Related papers: Inflation, structure formation and dark matter
The understanding of the primordial mechanism that seeded the cosmic structures we observe today in the sky is one of the major goals in cosmology. The leading paradigm for such a mechanism is provided by the inflationary scenario, a period…
There is strong evidence from cosmological data that the universe underwent an epoch of superluminal expansion called inflation. A satisfactory embedding of inflation in fundamental physics has been an outstanding problem at the interface…
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…
The precision cosmological model describing the origin and expansion history of the universe, with observed structure seeded at the inflationary cosmic horizon, demands completion in the ultraviolet and in the infrared. The dynamics of the…
Recently, attempts have been made to understand the apparent near coincidence of the present dark energy and matter energy in terms of a dynamical attractor-like solution for the evolution of a scalar field. In these models the field…
This article discusses density perturbations in inflationary models, offering a pedagogical description of how these perturbations are generated by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. A key feature of inflation is that that rapid…
We argue that the conjectured dark mater in the Universe may be endowed with a new kind of gravitational charge that couples to a short range gravitational interaction mediated by a massive vector field. A model is constructed that…
The physical basis of the modern cosmological inflationary models with baryosynthesis and nonbaryonic dark matter and energy implies such predictions of particle theory, that, in turn, apply to cosmology for their test. It makes physics of…
Cosmological inflation models with modifications to include recent cosmological observations has been an active area of research after WMAP 3 results, which have given us information about the composition of dark matter, normal matter and…
Dark matter (DM) may have its origin in a pre-Big Bang epoch, the cosmic inflation. Here, we consider for the first time a broad class of scenarios where a massive free scalar field unavoidably reaches an equilibrium between its classical…
In these lectures I focus on early universe models which can explain the currently observed structure on large scales. I begin with a survey of inflationary cosmology, the current paradigm for understanding the origin of the universe as we…
In this paper, inflationary cosmology is reviewed, paying particular attention to its observational signatures associated with large-scale density perturbations generated from quantum fluctuations. In the most general scalar-tensor theories…
Quintessential inflation provides a unified description of inflation and dark energy in terms of a single scalar degree of freedom, the cosmon. We present here a comprehensive overview of this appealing paradigm, highlighting its key…
We study cosmological gravitational particle production as applied to "rapid-turn" models of inflation involving two scalar fields. We are interested in the production of massive spin-0 particles that only interact gravitationally and…
In effective supergravity theories following from the superstring, a modulus field can quite naturally set the neccessary initial conditions for successful cosmological inflation to be driven by a hidden sector scalar field. The leading…
For physicists, recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology present exciting challenges. We are conducting "experiments" in energy regimes some of which will be probed by accelerators in the near future, and others which are…
We review the latest developments in the determination of the cosmological parameters from the measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) anisotropies and of the Large Scale Structure (LSS) of the Universe. We comment…
We present a simple model where a scalar field is responsible for cosmic inflation and generates the seed for structure formation, while its thermal relic abundance explains dark matter in the universe. The inflaton self-coupling also…
Forthcoming cosmic microwave background experiments (CMB) will provide precise new tests of structure-formation theories. The geometry of the Universe may be determined robustly, and the classical cosmological parameters, such as the…
It has been known for some time that the usual inference drawn from the observed near-flatness of the large-scale Universe - namely the existence of a cosmological "flatness problem", which is then taken as a partial, but key motivation for…