Related papers: Quantum cosmology and eternal inflation
Although the paradigm of inflation has been extensively studied to demonstrate how macroscopic inhomogeneities in our universe originate from quantum fluctuations, most of the established literature ignores the crucial role that…
After 25 years of its existence, inflationary theory gradually becomes the standard cosmological paradigm. However, we still do not know which of the many versions of inflationary cosmology will be favored by the future observational data.…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. I describe the quantum origin of density perturbations, giving a heuristic derivation of…
Causality is a seminal concept in science: Any research discipline, from sociology and medicine to physics and chemistry, aims at understanding the causes that could explain the correlations observed among some measured variables. While…
Loop quantum cosmology applies techniques derived for a background independent quantization of general relativity to cosmological situations and draws conclusions for the very early universe. Direct implications for the singularity problem…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
The status of quantum cosmologies as testable models of the early universe is assessed in the context of inflation. While traditional Wheeler-DeWitt quantization is unable to produce sizable effects in the cosmic microwave background, the…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
I review the current status of the theory of Cosmic Inflation. My discussion covers the motivation and implementation of the idea, as well as an analysis of recent successes and open questions. There is a special discussion of the physics…
We review here some recent results that show that inflationary cosmological models must contain initial singularities. We also present a new singularity theorem. The question of the initial singularity re-emerges in inflationary cosmology…
I summarize 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 described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…
It has been recently proposed that the multiverse of eternal inflation and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics can be identified, yielding a new view on the measure and measurement problems. In the present note, we argue…
We consider curved space quantum corrections to the equations of motion of the inflaton field in the early Universe. Using the stochastic formalism in phase space, we demonstrate that the quantum corrected evolution of the inflaton can…
Inflationary theory is already 20 years old, and it is impossible to describe all of its versions and implications in a short talk. I will concentrate on several subjects which I believe to be most important. First of all, I will give a…
In the hope of avoiding model dependence of the cosmological observables, phenomenological parametrizations of Cosmic Inflation have recently been proposed. Typically, they are expressed in terms of two parameters associated with an…
We present a brief review of Cosmological Inflation from the personal perspective of the author who almost 30 years ago proposed a way of resolving the problem of Cosmological Horizon by employing certain notions and developments from the…
Cosmic Inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which Quantum Gravity effects become important. General…
Inflation in the early Universe is one of the most promising probes of gravity in the high-energy regime. However, observable scales give access to a limited window in the inflationary dynamics. In this essay, we argue that quantum…