Related papers: Comment on Inflation and Alternative Cosmology
One way to judge the impact of the inflation concept is to consider where cosmology might be today without it. The Einstein-de Sitter model would not have been so keenly defended, and there might have been more interest in negative space…
In these two lectures I will discuss some outstanding problems in the standard model of cosmology, concentrating on the physics that might be related to the title of this school, ``Searching for the totally unexpected in the LHC era.'' In…
Inflationary cosmology has proved to be the most successful at predicting the properties of the anisotropies observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this essay we show that quantum field renormalization significantly…
Inflationary cosmology has provided a predictive and phenomenologically very successful scenario for early universe cosmology. Attempts to implement inflation using scalar fields, however, lead to models with serious conceptual problems. I…
We review some recent progress in the extraction of inflationary observables in loop quantum cosmology. Inverse-volume quantum corrections induce a growth of power in the large-scale cosmological spectra and are constrained by observations.
We identify troubling cases of so-called `permanent underdetermination' in both dark energy and inflationary cosmology. We bring to bear (a) a taxonomy of possible responses to underdetermination, and (b) an understanding of both dark…
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…
This is an old article which has never been posted for public use and which only appeard in a relatively hard-to-get Proceedings of the Sakharov Conference in Moscow (May, 1991). The subject of this article has received a lot of attention…
Cosmological inflation models with modifications to include recent cosmological observations has been an active area of research after WMAP 3 results, which have given us information about the composition of dark matter, normal matter and…
In these lectures I review the present status of the so-called Standard Cosmological Model, based on the hot Big Bang Theory and the Inflationary Paradigm. I will make special emphasis on the recent developments in observational cosmology,…
A variant of hybrid inflation which is applicable in a wide class of supersymmetric grand unified models and reproduces the observed temperature perturbations of cosmic background radiation with natural values of the parameters is…
I discuss the interplay between inflation and microwave background anisotropies, stressing in particular the accuracy with which inflation predictions need to be made, and the importance of inflation as an underlying paradigm for…
The anomaly-induced inflation (modified Starobinsky model) is based on the application of the effective quantum field theory approach to the Early Universe. We present a brief general review of this model with a special attention to the…
This is a short review, aimed at a general audience, of several current subjects of research in cosmology. The topics discussed include the cosmic microwave background (CMB), with particular emphasis on its relevance for testing inflation;…
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…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
This article contains a concise review of the theory of inflation. We discuss its main theoretical aspects as well as its observational predictions. We also explain how the most recent astrophysical observations constrain the inflationary…
Scalar fields provide attractive modifications of pre-BBN cosmology, which have interesting implications for dark matter abundances. We analyse the effect of these modifications on the number of e-foldings between horizon exit of CMB modes…
These lectures cover the basics of inflationary models for the early universe, concentrating particularly on the generation of density fluctuations from scalar-field dynamics. The subsequent gravitational dynamics of these fluctuations in…
A radiative seesaw model with an inert doublet dark matter is a promising candidate which could explain the existence of neutrino masses, dark matter and baryon number asymmetry of the Universe, simultaneously. In addition to these issues,…