Related papers: Some Key Issues Confronting Inflationary Cosmology
I use cosmology examples to illustrate that the second law of thermodynamics is not old and tired, but alive and kicking, continuing to stimulate interesting research on really big puzzles. The question "Why is the entropy so low?" (despite…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
I present a pedagogical review of inflation and the cosmic microwave background. I describe how a short period of accelerated expansion can replace the special initial conditions of the standard big bang model. I also describe the…
Open Inflation has recently been suggested as a possible way out of the age crisis caused by observations of a large rate of expansion of the universe, in conflict with the existence of very old globular clusters. It proposes that our local…
The universe we observe is homogeneous on super-horizon scales, leading to the ``cosmic homogeneity problem''. Inflation alleviates this problem but cannot solve it within the realm of conservative extrapolations of classical physics. A…
We review recent developments in the theory of inflation and cosmological perturbations produced from inflation. After a brief introduction of the standard, single-field slow-roll inflation, and the curvature and tensor perturbations…
We review the theory of inflationary perturbations. Perturbations at both linear and nonlinear orders are reviewed. We also review a variety of inflation models, emphasizing their signatures on cosmic perturbations.
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
A brief account is given of large-scale structure modelling based on the assumption that the initial perturbations arise from inflation. A recap is made of the implications of inflation for large-scale structure; under the widely applicable…
We show that in generic supergravity theories the mass of the moduli during inflation is larger (or at least of the same order of magnitude) than the Hubble constant. This fact does not depends on the details of the inflation and on the…
Modifying the standard hot big bang model of cosmology with an inflationary event has been very successful in resolving most of the outstanding cosmological problems. The various inflationary mechanisms proposed depend on the production of…
We study a class of non-local, action-based, and purely gravitational models. These models seek to describe a cosmology in which inflation is driven by a large, bare cosmological constant that is screened by the self-gravitation between the…
We briefly discuss cosmic inflation, which is the dominant paradigm for the generation of the large scale structure in the Universe and also for arranging for the initial conditions of the hot Big Bang. We then present quintessential…
A unified description of inflation, dark energy, and dark matter is presented within a two-scalar-field cosmological model. Inflation, assumed to be of the warm type, is driven by one of the scalar fields, which, shortly after the end of…
A new idea of deriving a cosmological term from an underlying theory has been proposed in order to explain the expansion history of the universe. We obtain the scale factor with this derived cosmological term and demonstrate that it…
We show that holographic dark energy could explain why the current dark energy density is so small, if there was an inflation with a sufficient expansion in the early universe. It is also suggested that an inflation with the number of…
We investigate the inflationary expansion of the universe induced by higher curvature corrections in M-theory. The inflationary evolution of the geometry is discussed in ref.[1], thus we succeed to analyse metric perturbations around the…
A particular compensation-type solution of the main cosmological constant problem has been proposed recently, with two massless vector fields dynamically canceling an arbitrary cosmological constant \Lambda. The naive expectation is that…
We review why the search for a causal explanation of the large scale properties of the universe supports the idea that an extended period of accelerated expansion, called inflation, preceded primordial nucleosynthesis. As a consequence of…
In these lectures I review the present status of the so-called Standard Cosmological Model, based on the hot Big Bang Theory and the Inflationary Paradigm. I will make special emphasis on the recent developments in observational cosmology,…