Related papers: Can Inflation be Falsified?
A general overview of the history and present status of inflationary cosmology is given. Recent developments discussed in this paper include the hybrid inflation scenario, the theory of reheating, and the theory of inflating tolopogical…
The inflationary paradigm, although very successful phenomenologically, suffers from several conceptual problems which motivate the search for alternative scenarios of early universe cosmology. Here, two possible alternatives will be…
This contribution consists of two parts. In the first part, I review the tunneling approach to quantum cosmology and comment on the alternative approaches. In the second part, I discuss the relation between quantum cosmology and eternal…
In a previous paper we proposed a new approach to the beginning of inflation -- a lingering universe. The universe begins in a lingering state with a nearly vanishing Hubble parameter. This calls into question the absolute age of the…
In these lectures I focus on early universe models which can explain the currently observed structure on large scales. I begin with a survey of inflationary cosmology, the current paradigm for understanding the origin of the universe as we…
We consider the Standard Models of particle physics and hot big bang cosmology, and review the theoretical and experimental motivations for extending these models to include supersymmetry and inflation. An obvious extension would be to…
The purpose of these lectures is to give a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the production of primordial perturbations, as well as a review of some of the latest developments in this domain. After a short introduction, we review…
Inflationary cosmology successfully accounts for the observed properties of primordial fluctuations using quantum field theory in an expanding background. However, the quantum nature of these fluctuations has not been experimentally…
The standard big bang cosmological model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions are summarized. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with…
Warm inflation is an inflationary scenario in which a thermal bath coexists with the inflaton during inflation. This is unlike standard cold inflation in which the Universe is effectively devoid of particles during inflation. The thermal…
A particular compensation-type solution of the main cosmological constant problem has been proposed recently, with two massless vector fields dynamically canceling an arbitrary cosmological constant \Lambda. The naive expectation is that…
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
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…
Cosmic inflation claims to make the initial conditions of the standard big bang "generic". But Boltzmann taught us that the thermodynamic arrow of time arises from very non-generic ("low entropy") initial conditions. I discuss how to…
The inflationary paradigm provides a robust description of the peculiar initial conditions which are required for the success of the Hot Big Bang model of cosmology, as well as of the recent precision measurements of temperature…
The main aim of this paper is to provide a qualitative introduction to the cosmic inflation and its relationship with current cosmological observations. The inflationary model solves many of the fundamental problems that challenge the…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
The Dark Side of the Universe, which includes the cosmological inflation in the early Universe, the current dark energy and dark matter, can be theoretically described by supergravity, though it is non-trivial. We recall the arguments pro…
We study the cosmological inflation from the viewpoint of the moduli stabilization. We study the scenario that the superpotential has a large value during the inflation era enough to stabilize moduli, but it is small in the true vacuum.…
It has been known for some time that the usual inference drawn from the observed near-flatness of the large-scale Universe - namely the existence of a cosmological "flatness problem", which is then taken as a partial, but key motivation for…