Related papers: Cosmic Defects
This paper is intended to offer a pedagogical treatment of cosmological modeling and inflationary cosmology. In recent years, inflation has become accepted as a standard scenario making predictions that are testable by observations of the…
This is a survey article for the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics, 2nd Edition. Topological defects are described in the context of the 2-dimensional Ising model on the lattice, in 2-dimensional quantum field theory, in topological…
These lectures provide a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the theory of cosmological perturbations generated during inflation which are thought to be the origin of structure in the universe.
We review locked inflation and we critically address phenomenological and consistency issues thathave appeared in the literature. A natural window of opportunity is found for the original scenario.Moreover, a simple way to enlarge the…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
In this Reply I present some arguments in favor of the stability of the topological defect composed by global and magnetic monopoles.
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…
An introduction to modern cosmology is given, focusing on theories for the origin of structure in the Universe. After a brief review of the theory of growth of cosmological perturbations and a summary of some important observational…
We present a re-analysis of the cosmic confusion hypothesis, elucidating the degree to which ``confusion'' can be expected to hold in a class of flat, adiabatic models. This allows us to devise a simple and accurate fitting function for the…
These lecture notes provide an introduction to cosmic inflation. In particular I will review the basic concepts of inflation, generation of density perturbations, and reheating after inflation.
Cosmological inflation generates primordial density perturbations on all scales, including those far too small to contribute to the cosmic microwave background. At these scales, isolated ultracompact minihalos of dark matter can form well…
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…
A Kantowski-Sachs cosmological model with an O(3) global defect as a source is studied in the context of the topological inflation scenario.
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
It has been shown that sub-Planckian models of inflation require initial homogeneity on super-Hubble scales under certain commonly held assumptions. Here I remark on the possible implications of this result for inflationary cosmology.
The constraints on the models for the structure formation arising from various cosmological observations at different length scales are reviewed. The status of different models for structure formation is examined critically in the light of…
In supersymmetric theories, topological defects can have nontrivial behaviors determined purely by whether or not supersymmetry is restored in the defect core. A well-known example of this is that some supersymmetric cosmic strings are…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
Topological defects are singularities in material fields that play a vital role across a range of systems: from cosmic microwave background polarization to superconductors, and biological materials. Although topological defects and their…
A variant of hybrid inflation which is applicable in a wide class of supersymmetric grand unified models and reproduces the observed temperature perturbations of cosmic background radiation with natural values of the parameters is…