Related papers: Can Inflation be Falsified?
A (very) brief review of topological defects and their possible cosmic roles. I emphasize in particular that superheavy defects needed for structure formation can peacefully coexist with inflation, despite the claims to the contrary which…
These lecture notes intend to form a short pedagogical introduction to inflationary cosmology, highlighting selected areas of recent progress such as reheating and the theory of cosmological perturbations. Problems of principle for…
Variation of constants in the very early universe can generate inflation. We consider a scenario where the strong coupling constant was changing in time and where the gluon condensate underwent a phase transition ending the inflation.
An introduction to modern theories for the origin of structure in the Universe is given. After a brief review of the growth of cosmological perturbations in an expanding Universe and a summary of some important observational results, the…
The Big Bang singularity in standard model cosmology suggests a program of study in 'early universe' quantum gravity phenomenology. Inflation is usually thought to undermine this program's prospects by means of a dynamical diluting…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. It is argued that essentially all inflationary models lead to (future-)eternal…
I review the present status of the problem of initial conditions for inflation and describe several ways to solve this problem for many popular inflationary models, including the recent generation of the models with plateau potentials…
The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of…
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…
The standard model of cosmology posits that some time in the remote past, labelled as t=0, a Big-Bang occurred. However, it does not tell what caused the Big-Bang and subsequently the Inflation. In the present work the cause of the Big-Bang…
A brief account is given of large-scale structure modelling based on the assumption that the initial perturbations arise from inflation. A recap is made of the implications of inflation for large-scale structure; under the widely applicable…
Inflation as the leading paradigm depicting the very early universe physics could leave imprints on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Using currently available CMB observations, we give the tightest constraints on inflation…
We investigate the quantum cosmological tunneling scenario for inflationary models. Within a path-integral approach, we derive the corresponding tunneling probability distribution. A sharp peak in this distribution can be interpreted as the…
The world view suggested by quantum cosmology is that inflating universes with all possible values of the fundamental constants are spontaneously created out of nothing. I explore the consequences of the assumption that we are a `typical'…
In these lectures the present status of the so-called standard cosmological model, based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm is reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the origin of the cosmological perturbations we see…
I review the motivation for the early-time cosmic acceleration stage in expanding universe and discuss simple inflationary scenarios. Preheating and reheating are considered in great detail. This is a sample chapter from my book "Physical…
For two decades the hot big-bang model as been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not answered by the standard cosmology and…
These four lectures cover four topics in modern cosmology: the cosmological constant, the cosmic microwave background, inflation, and cosmology as a probe of physics at the Planck scale. The underlying theme is that cosmology gives us a…
Recent advances in observational cosmology are changing the way we view the nature of time. In general relativity, the freedom in choosing a time hypersurface has hampered the implementation of the theory. Fortunately, Hamilton-Jacobi…
The very basics of cosmological inflation are discussed. We derive the equations of motion for the inflaton field, introduce the slow-roll parameters, and present the computation of the inflationary perturbations and their connection to the…