Related papers: Can Inflation be Falsified?
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…
I present a brief review of astro-ph/0406099, which argues that there is a limit on the number of efolds of inflation which are observable in a universe which undergoes an eternally accelerated expansion in the future. Such an acceleration…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
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…
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…
According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…
Inflation is a promising solution to many problems of the standard Big-Bang cosmology. Nevertheless, inflationary models have proved less compelling. In this chapter, we discuss why supersymmetry has led to more natural models of inflation.…
Inflation offers a simple model for very early evolution of our Universe and the origin of primordial perturbations on large scales. Over the last 25 years we have become familiar with the predictions of single-field models, but inflation…
We briefly discuss cosmic inflation, which is the dominant paradigm for the generation of the large scale structure in the Universe and also for arranging for the initial conditions of the hot Big Bang. We then present quintessential…
We contrast the possibility of inflation starting a) from the universe's inception or b) from an earlier non-inflationary state. Neither case is ideal since a) assumes quantum mechanical reasoning is straightforwardly applicable to the…
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…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
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…
Models of cosmic inflation posit an early phase of accelerated expansion of the universe, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields in curved spacetime. Though detailed assumptions about fields and couplings vary across models,…
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…
We consider an inflationary universe scenario with multiple stages of inflation. The primary inflation, which may start at the Planck epoch, is followed by secondary inflations, which include the cosmological inflation that causes the…
It is commonly believed that our Universe has experienced two different stages of accelerated expansion. The early stage is known as inflation and the current acceleration is driven by dark energy. Observing inflation and dark energy…
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…
We find that general relativity can be naturally free of cosmological singularities. Several nonsingular models are currently available that either assume ad hoc matter contents, or are nonsingular only over a sector of solution space of…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…