Related papers: Inflation, structure formation and dark matter
Observational tests during the next decade may determine if the evolution of the Universe can be understood from fundamental physical principles, or if special initial conditions, coincidences, and new, untestable physical laws must be…
Observational constraints guide one forcefully to examine models in which the matter density is substantially less than critical density. Particularly noteworthy are those which are consistent with inflation. For these models, microwave…
In forthcoming years, connections between cosmology and particle physics will be made increasingly important with the advent of a new generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Here, we review a number of these links. Our…
Kination dominated quintessence models of dark energy have the intriguing feature that the relic abundance of thermal cold dark matter can be significantly enhanced compared to the predictions from standard cosmology. Previous treatments of…
A radiative seesaw model with an inert doublet dark matter is a promising candidate which could explain the existence of neutrino masses, dark matter and baryon number asymmetry of the Universe, simultaneously. In addition to these issues,…
The Cold Dark Matter theory of gravitationally-driven hierarchical structure formation has earned its status as a paradigm by explaining the distribution of matter over large spans of cosmic distance and time. However, its central tenet,…
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
This study reviews the advances made in inflationary theory, especially regarding the seeming disparity between inflation energy and dark energy, and their significance to cosmic evolution as a whole. I attempt to connect the two sources of…
We critically review the role of cosmological moduli in determining the post-inflationary history of the universe. Moduli are ubiquitous in string and M-theory constructions of beyond the Standard Model physics, where they parametrize the…
Cosmic inflation provides a window to the highest energy densities accessible in nature, far beyond those achievable in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Theoretical insights into the inflationary era and its observational probes may…
Though predictions of the simplest inflationary cosmological models with cold dark matter, flat space and approximately flat initial spectrum of adiabatic perturbations are remarkably close to observational data, we have to go beyond them…
Three-forms can give rise to viable cosmological scenarios of inflation and dark energy with potentially observable signatures distinct from standard single scalar field models. In this study, the background dynamics and linear…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
Motivated by their potential role as dark matter, we study the cosmological evolution of light scalar and vector fields non-minimally coupled to gravity. Our focus is on a situation where the dominant contribution to the energy density…
Inflation is a bold and expansive extension of the Standard Cosmology. It holds the promise to extend our understanding of the Universe to within 10^{-32}sec of the big bang and answer most of the pressing questions in cosmology. Its…
Does inflation provide a compelling explanation for why the universe is so large, so flat, and so old, and a predictive theory of density perturbations? In this brief contribution (based on the role of the author as moderator of the…
In the present work we discuss inflation, dark matter and cosmological evolution in the context of the brane-world scenario. Being string theory inspired, the brane-world models provide corrections to the General Relativity, which is…
With the recent measurements of temperature and polarization anisotropies in the microwave background by WMAP, we have entered a new era of precision cosmology, with the cosmological parameters of a Standard Cosmological Model determined to…
We consider supersymmetric inflation models in which inflation occurs at an intermediate scale and which provide a solution to the $\mu$ problem and the strong CP problem. Such models are particularly attractive since inflation,…
While the topology of the Universe is at present not specified by any known fundamental theory, it may in principle be determined through observations. In particular, a non-trivial topology will generate pairs of matching circles of…