Related papers: The Early Universe
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…
I review two different connections between particle theory and early-Universe cosmology: (1) Cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) tests of inflation and (2) particle dark matter. The inflationary predictions of a flat Universe and a nearly…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
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…
I present a brief review of astro-ph/0406099, which argues that there is a limit on the number of efolds of inflation which are observable in a universe which undergoes an eternally accelerated expansion in the future. Such an acceleration…
In a unified picture both inflation and present dynamical dark energy arise from the same scalar field. The history of the Universe describes a crossover from a scale invariant "past fixed point" where all particles are massless, to a…
A rapid phase of accelerated expansion in the early universe, known as inflation, dilutes all matter except the vacuum induced quantum fluctuations. These are responsible for seeding the initial perturbations in the baryonic matter, the…
We propose an explanation for the present accelerated expansion of the universe that does not invoke dark energy or a modification of gravity and is firmly rooted in inflationary cosmology.
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…
The very basics of cosmological inflation are discussed. We derive the equations of motion for the inflaton field, introduce the slow-roll parameters, and present the computation of the inflationary perturbations and their connection to the…
The established cosmological theory which describes the history of the Universe since shortly after the "Big Bang" until today is remarkably successful. Thanks to the increasing precision of available observational data, we are now able to…
Warm inflation has normalized two ideas in cosmology, that in the early universe the initial primordial density perturbations generally could be of classical rather than quantum origin and that during inflation, particle production from…
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…
We study the quantum evolution of the early universe, its semi-classical analogue together with inflationary regime, in view of a generalized modified theory of gravity. The action is built by supplementing the non-minimally coupled…
In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…
These lectures present a brief review of inflationary cosmology, provide an overview of the theory of cosmological perturbations, and then focus on the conceptual problems of the current paradigm of early universe cosmology, thus motivating…
We give a consistent description of how the inflationary Universe emerges in quantum cosmology. This involves two steps: Firstly, it is shown that a sensible probability peak can be obtained from the cosmological wave function. This is…
These lecture notes intend to form a short pedagogical introduction to inflationary cosmology, highlighting selected areas of recent progress such as reheating and the theory of cosmological perturbations. Problems of principle for…
According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…
While there is no consensus about the history of time since the beginning, in this paper I will discuss some possibilities. We have a pretty clear picture of cosmic history from the electroweak phase transition through the time of…