Related papers: Can Inflation be Falsified?
This study reviews the advances made in inflationary theory, especially regarding the seeming disparity between inflation energy and dark energy, and their significance to cosmic evolution as a whole. I attempt to connect the two sources of…
We give a consistent description of how the inflationary Universe emerges in quantum cosmology. This involves two steps: Firstly, it is shown that a sensible probability peak can be obtained from the cosmological wave function. This is…
Inflation may have been driven by a component which violated the Null-Energy Condition, thereby leading to {\it super inflation}. We provide the formalism to study cosmological perturbations when such a component is described by a scalar…
It has been shown that sub-Planckian models of inflation require initial homogeneity on super-Hubble scales under certain commonly held assumptions. Here I remark on the possible implications of this result for inflationary cosmology.
The eternal inflation problem continues to be considered one of standard's cosmology most serious shortcomings. This arises when one considers the effects of "quantum fluctuations" (QF) on the zero mode of inflaton field during a Hubble…
In this short review, the predictions of inflation are presented and compared to the most recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy. It is argued that inflation is compatible with these observations but that…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave…
The formation of structure in the Universe offers some of the most powerful evidence in favour of the existence of dark matter in the Universe. We summarize recent work by ourselves and our collaborators, using linear and quasi-linear…
The inflationary scenario, which states that the early universe underwent a brief but dramatic period of accelerated spatial expansion, has become the current paradigm of early universe cosmology. Although inflationary cosmology has its…
In spite of its great phenomenological success, current models of scalar field-driven inflation suffer from important unresolved conceptual issues. New fundamental physics will be required to address these questions. String theory is a…
These lecture notes provide an introduction to cosmic inflation. In particular I will review the basic concepts of inflation, generation of density perturbations, and reheating after inflation.
We study cosmological solutions for the very early universe beginning at the Planck scale for a universe containing radiation, curvature and, as a simplification of a possible scalar field potential, a cosmological constant term. The…
This thesis is dedicated to the study of inflationary scenarios based on string theory. Inflation is a brief period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe which gives natural explanations for problems of the Standard Big Bang…
Eternal inflation, the idea that there is always a part of the universe that is expanding exponentially, is a frequent feature of inflationary models. It has been argued that eternal inflation requires the violation of energy conditions,…
Cosmological inflation is studied in the case where the inflaton is the overall modulus $T$ for an orbifold. General forms of the (non-perturbative) superpotential are considered to ensure that $G=K+{\rm ln}|W|^2$ is modular invariant. We…
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
The existence of the inflationary era in the early Universe seems to be strongly supported by recent CMB observations. However, only a few realistic inflation scenarios which have close relation to particle physics seem to have been known…
Cosmological inflation is not the only early universe scenario consistent with current observational data. I will discuss the criteria for a successful early universe cosmology, compare a couple of the proposed scenarios (inflation,…
Since the advent of inflation, several theorems have been proven suggesting that although inflation can (and generically does) continue eternally into the future, it cannot be extended eternally into the past to create a ``steady-state''…