Related papers: Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Pri…
Phantom Cosmology provides an unique opportunity to "connect" the phantom driven (low en- ergy meV scale) dark energy phase to the (high energy GUT scale) inflationary era. This is possible because the energy density increases in phantom…
Inflationary cosmology explains the homogeneity and large-scale structure of the universe through a brief epoch of accelerated expansion following the Big Bang. Cyclic cosmologies, in contrast, describe a universe undergoing successive…
Although ultimately motivated by quantum theoretical considerations, Everett's many-world idea remains valid, as an approximation, in the classical limit. However to be applicable it must in any case be applied in conjunction with an…
In this lecture I give a pedagogical introduction to inflationary cosmology with a special focus on the quantum generation of cosmological perturbations.
These lectures are intended to give a pedagogical introduction to the main current picture of the very early universe. After elementary reviews of general relativity and of the standard Big Bang model, the following subjects are discussed:…
A popular science article designed to introduce people familiar with basic cosmological nomenclature with models alternative to cosmological inflation. The paper briefly discusses the modern view of the Big Bang model, inflation (both its…
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…
We discuss scientific realism from the perspective of modern cosmology, especially primordial cosmology: i.e. the cosmological investigation of the very early universe. We first (Section 2) state our allegiance to scientific realism, and…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
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…
The 2015 Planck data release tightened the region of the allowed inflationary models. Inflationary models with convex potentials have now been ruled out since they produce a large tensor to scalar ratio. Meanwhile the same data offers…
The QCD axion is the leading solution to the strong-CP problem, a dark matter candidate, and a possible result of string theory compactifications. However, for axions produced before inflation, symmetry-breaking scales of $f_a \gtrsim…
We present a brief review of Cosmological Inflation from the personal perspective of the author who almost 30 years ago proposed a way of resolving the problem of Cosmological Horizon by employing certain notions and developments from the…
There exists the "entropy problem" of the early universe, that is, why did the universe begin with an extremely low entropy and how did it evolve into such high entropy at late times? It has been long believed that inflation cannot be the…
If inflation occurs after the breaking of Peccei-Quinn symmetry then large values of the breaking scale $F$, which are forbidden in conventional axion cosmology, are permitted, provided that we inhabit a region of the Multiverse where the…
According to the theory of cosmic inflation, the large scale structures observed in our Universe (galaxies, clusters of galaxies, Cosmic Background Microwave - CMB - anisotropy ...) are of quantum mechanical origin. They are nothing but…
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,…
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…
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 early stages of the universe evolution are discussed according to the hot big bang model and the grand unified theories. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized and their resolution by inflationary cosmology is sketched.…