Related papers: Inflation and the cosmic microwave background
These lecture notes provide an introduction to cosmic inflation. In particular I will review the basic concepts of inflation, generation of density perturbations, and reheating after inflation.
Inflationary cosmology provides a natural mechanism for the generation of primordial perturbations which seed the formation of observed cosmic structure and lead to specific signals of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background…
The increasing precision of cosmological datasets is opening up new opportunities to test predictions from cosmic inflation. Here we study the impact of high precision constraints on the primordial power spectrum and show how a new…
The observed power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is consistent with inflationary cosmology, which predicts a nearly scale-invariant power spectrum of quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field as they exit the Hubble…
I review the present status of the Cosmic Microwave Background, with some emphasis on the current and future implications for particle physics. Conclusions are: gravitational instability in a dark matter dominated universe grew today's…
We propose a Lambda-inflation model which explains a significant part of the COBE signal by primordial cosmic gravitational waves. The primordial density perturbations fulfill both the constraints of large-scale microwave background and…
Anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation due to gravity waves are investigated. An initial spectrum of gravity waves may have been induced during an epoch of inflation. We study the propagation of such a spectrum in a…
In this lecture, after a synthetic review of measurements of CMB temperature anisotropies and of their cosmological implications, the theoretical background of CMB polarization is summarized and the concepts of the main experiments that are…
We analyse the mechanism of quintessential inflation in brane world scenarios for a number of particle physics inspired scalar potentials. We constrain the parameter space of those scalar potentials and comment on the likelihood that we…
In the last few decades, advances in observational cosmology have given us a standard model of cosmology. We know the content of the universe to within a few percent. With more ambitious experiments on the way, we hope to move beyond the…
One of the fundamental and yet untested predictions of inflationary models is the generation of a very weak cosmic background of gravitational radiation. We investigate the sensitivity required for a space-based gravitational wave laser…
With polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now detected, and confirmed by several independent experiments, the next goal is to characterise accurately its statistical properties. In these lecture notes we review the physical…
After a brief summary of general relativity and cosmology, we present the basic concepts underlying inflation, the currently best motivated models for the early Universe. We describe the simplest inflation models, based on a single scalar…
Motivated by recent progress in our understanding of the $B$-mode polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB), which provides important information about the inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), we study the possibility to acquire…
Inflationary predictions of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy are often based on the slow-roll approximation. We study the precision of these predictions and compare them with the recent data from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1.
Quantum effect on the BB-mode correlation spectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background for several inflation models is studied with the BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck joint data. The results do not rule out either single or multi field models of…
Inflation predicts a stochastic background of gravitational waves over a broad range of frequencies, from those accessible with cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements, to those accessible directly with gravitational-wave detectors,…
The existence of the inflationary era in the early Universe seems to be strongly supported by recent CMB observations. However, only a few realistic inflation scenarios which have close relation to particle physics seem to have been known…
These lectures are intended to give a pedagogical introduction to the main current picture of the very early universe. After elementary reviews of general relativity and of the standard Big Bang model, the following subjects are discussed:…
We consider the impact of thermal inflation -- a short, secondary period of inflation that can arise in supersymmetric scenarios -- on the stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that while the primordial inflationary…