Related papers: Can Inflation be Falsified?
Recently Hollands and Wald argued that inflation does not solve any of the major cosmological problems. We explain why we disagree with their arguments. They also proposed a new speculative mechanism of generation of density perturbations.…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
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…
Modern physics has unlocked a number of mysteries regarding the early Universe, such as the baryogenesis, the unification of the strong and electroweak forces and the nucleosynthesis. However, understanding the very early Universe, close to…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
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…
Inflation has been the driving idea in cosmology for two decades and is a pillar of the New Cosmology. The inflationary paradigm has now passed its first round of significant tests, with two of its three basics predictions confirmed at…
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…
The inflationary scenario is not the only paradigm of early universe cosmology which is consistent with current observations. General criteria will be presented which any successful early universe model must satisfy. Various ways, including…
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…
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…
In this review I consider several different issues related to inflation. I will begin with the wave function of the Universe. This issue is pretty old, but recently there were some new insights based on the theory of the self-reproducing…
Inflation is known to be generically eternal to the future: the false vacuum is thermalized in some regions of space, while inflation continues in other regions. Here, we address the question of whether inflation can also be eternal to the…
We consider a novel model of cosmic inflation. In our model one does not need any specific matter field to drive inflation, but inflation stems from the microscopic, Planck scale structure of spacetime, thus being of quantum gravitational…
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…
The inflationary scenario has become the paradigm of early universe cosmology, and - in conjuction with ideas from superstring theory - has led to speculations about an "inflationary multiverse". From a point of view of phenomenology, the…
This paper is intended to offer a pedagogical treatment of cosmological modeling and inflationary cosmology. In recent years, inflation has become accepted as a standard scenario making predictions that are testable by observations of the…
If our universe underwent inflation, its entropy during the inflationary phase was substantially lower than it is today. Because a low-entropy state is less likely to be chosen randomly than a high-entropy one, inflation is unlikely to…
The early Universe inflation is well known as a promising theory to explain the origin of large scale structure of Universe and to solve the early universe pressing problems. For a resonable inflation model, the potential during inflation…
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,…