Related papers: Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Inflation
Cosmological inflation is studied in the case where the inflaton is the overall modulus $T$ for an orbifold. General forms of the (non-perturbative) superpotential are considered to ensure that $G=K+{\rm ln}|W|^2$ is modular invariant. We…
We are on the verge of the first precision testing of the inflationary cosmology as a model for the origin of structure in the Universe. I review the key predictions of inflation which can be used as observational tests, in the sense of…
In spite of its great phenomenological success, current models of scalar field-driven inflation suffer from important unresolved conceptual issues. New fundamental physics will be required to address these questions. String theory is a…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. It is argued that essentially all inflationary models lead to (future-)eternal…
Recent developments in cosmology suggest that much of the universe is in a state of explosive, accelerated expansion, called inflation. We live in a "bubble" where inflation has ended, and other bubbles with diverse properties are…
This is the summary of two lectures that aim to give an overview of cosmology. I will not try to be too rigorous in derivations, nor to give a full historical overview. The idea is to provide a "taste" of cosmology and some of the…
This is the LaTeX version of my book "Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology'' (Harwood, Chur, Switzerland, 1990). I decided to put it to hep-th, to make it easily available. Many things happened during the 15 years since the time when…
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…
In this short review, the predictions of inflation are presented and compared to the most recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy. It is argued that inflation is compatible with these observations but that…
The theory of cosmological perturbations has become a cornerstone of modern quantitative cosmology since it is the framework which provides the link between the models of the very early Universe such as the inflationary Universe scenario…
On the one hand, inflation is an extremely convincing scenario: it solves most cosmological paradoxes and generates fluctuations that became the seeds for the growth of structures. It, however, suffers from a "naturalness" problem:…
We investigate how various inflationary and bouncing cosmologies can be realized by imperfect fluids with a generalized equation of state, in the context of both classical and loop quantum cosmology. With regards to the inflationary…
At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological…
The accelerated expansion of space during the period of cosmological inflation leads to trans-Planckian issues which need to be addressed. Most importantly, the physical wavelength of fluctuations which are studied at the present time by…
Extended inflation is a promising new approach to implementing the inflationary universe scenario. This paper reviews recent advances including a new, more robust mechanism for ending extended inflation, a new prediction for the density…
A unified description of inflation, dark energy, and dark matter is presented within a two-scalar-field cosmological model. Inflation, assumed to be of the warm type, is driven by one of the scalar fields, which, shortly after the end of…
A new idea of deriving a cosmological term from an underlying theory has been proposed in order to explain the expansion history of the universe. We obtain the scale factor with this derived cosmological term and demonstrate that it…
We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
An overview is presented of some cosmological aspects of string theory. Recent developments are emphasised, especially the attempts to derive inflation or alternatives to inflation from the dynamics of branes in string theory. Time…
For more seventy years physicists have appreciated that Nature's vacuum is far from empty. The discovery of the Lamb shift in Hydrogen provided dramatic verification of the reality of the quantum vacuum. The advent of gauge theories has led…