Related papers: Inflationary Cosmology
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…
Inflationary Cosmology makes the universe ``eternal" and provides for recurrent universe creation, ad infinitum -- making it also plausible to assume that ``our" Big Bang was also preceeded by others, etc.. However, GR tells us that in the…
How did it all begin? Although this question has undoubtedly lingered for as long as humans have walked the Earth, the answer still eludes us. Yet since my grandparents were born, scientists have been able to refine this question to a…
A bouncing cosmology with an initial matter-dominated phase of contraction during which scales which are currently probed with cosmological observations exit the Hubble radius provides a mechanism alternative to inflation for producing a…
Recent measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that the Universe is flat and that large-scale structure grew via gravitational infall from primordial adiabatic perturbations. Both of these…
Cosmic inflation is arguably the most favoured paradigm of the very early Universe. It postulates an early phase of fast, nearly exponential, and accelerated expansion. Inflationary models are capable of explaining the overall flatness and…
Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of the Universe -- spatially flat; accelerating; comprised of 1/3 a new form of matter, 2/3 a new form of energy, with some ordinary matter and a dash of massive neutrinos; and…
We re-analyze the question of the use of cosmological observations to infer the present state and future evolution of our patch of the universe. In particular, we discuss under which conditions one might be able to infer that our patch will…
These lecture notes are organized into ten lessons that summarize the status of inflationary cosmology.
We argue that the emergent spacetime picture admits a background-independent formulation of cosmic inflation. The inflation in this picture corresponds to the dynamical emergence of spacetime while the conventional inflation is simply an…
The prediction of a phase of inflation whose number of e-folds is constrained is an important feature of loop quantum cosmology. This work aims at giving some elementary clarifications on the role of the different hypotheses leading to this…
We give an introduction to the cosmological multiverse, aimed at an audience of artists. We discuss general relativity -- our modern theory of gravity -- and the cosmological constant, which is widely believed to be responsible for the…
Perhaps the deepest mystery of our accelerating Universe in expansion is the existence of a tiny and rigid cosmological constant, $\Lambda$. Its size is many orders of magnitude below the expected one in the standard model of particle…
The present paradigm in cosmology is the usual Big-Bang Cosmology in which two stages of accelerated expansion are incorporated: the inflationary phase in the very early universe which produces the classical inhomogeneities observed in the…
In this talk we discuss three different issues. First of all, there exist several proposals how to solve cosmological problems by adiabatic expansion of the Universe, without any use of inflation. We explain why these models do not solve…
Loop quantum cosmology provides a nice solution of avoiding the big bang singularity through a big bounce mechanism in the high energy region. In loop quantum cosmology an inflationary universe is emergent after the big bounce, no matter…
The first aim of this lecture is to highlight two areas of recent progress in inflationary cosmology, namely reheating and the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations. The second aim is to discuss important conceptual problems for the…
The changes of main paradigms on the structure and evolution of the Universe are reviewed. Two puzzles of the modern cosmology, the mean density of matter and the regularity of the Universe on large scales, as well as the possibility to…
We develop a quantum-cosmological framework in which the inflationary potential emerges from the structure of the wave function of the universe rather than being postulated. Starting from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for a flat…
In a series of five lectures I review inflationary cosmology. I begin with a description of the initial conditions problems of the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) cosmology and then explain how inflation, an early period of accelerated…