Related papers: Astrophysics and Cosmology
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…
In the standard cosmological theory one uses the Einstein concepts of space and time as were originally introduced for the special theory of relativity and the general relativity theory. According to this approach all physical quantities…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
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…
This paper presents a necessarily incomplete review of the evolution of cosmology since the first Astro/Cosmo Moriond meeting in 1981. I trace the journey from the classical Big Bang model based on three pillars -- universe expansion,…
We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
After 25 years of its existence, inflationary theory gradually becomes the standard cosmological paradigm. However, we still do not know which of the many versions of inflationary cosmology will be favored by the future observational data.…
Small fluctuations around homogeneous and isotropic expanding backgrounds are the main object of study in cosmology. Their origin and evolution is sensitive to the physical processes that happen during inflation and in the late Universe. As…
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…
The early Universe inflation is well known as a promising theory to explain the origin of large scale structure of the Universe, a causal theory for the origin of primordial density fluctuations which may explain the observed density…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
This review describes the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 and its impact on cosmology in the 50 years that followed. This discovery has established the Big Bang model of the Universe and the analysis of its…
This is the summary of two lectures that aim to give an overview of cosmology. I will not try to be too rigorous in derivations, nor to give a full historical overview. The idea is to provide a "taste" of cosmology and some of the…
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…
In this review I briefly describe the evolution of the inflationary theory from the scenario based on the idea of supercooling and expansion in the false vacuum toward the theory of eternally expanding self-reproducing inflationary…
Loop quantum cosmology provides an efficient framework to study the evolution of the Universe beyond the classical Big Bang paradigm. Because of holonomy corrections, the singularity is replaced by a "bounce". The dynamics of the background…
Inflation predicts that quantum fluctuations determine the large scale structure of the Universe. This raises the striking possibility that quantum mechanics, developed to describe nature at short distances, can be tested by studying nature…
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…
The established cosmological theory which describes the history of the Universe since shortly after the "Big Bang" until today is remarkably successful. Thanks to the increasing precision of available observational data, we are now able to…
The Hubble expansion of galaxies, the $2.73\dK$ blackbody radiation background and the cosmic abundances of the light elements argue for a hot, dense origin of the universe --- the standard Big Bang cosmology --- and enable its evolution to…