Related papers: Inflation, quantum fluctuations and cosmological p…
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
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…
Inflationary theory is already 20 years old, and it is impossible to describe all of its versions and implications in a short talk. I will concentrate on several subjects which I believe to be most important. First of all, I will give a…
We consider the Standard Models of particle physics and hot big bang cosmology, and review the theoretical and experimental motivations for extending these models to include supersymmetry and inflation. An obvious extension would be to…
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…
This pedagogical review aims at presenting the fundamental aspects of the theory of inflationary cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. The analogy with the well-known Schwinger effect is discussed in detail and a…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
Previously defined covariant and gauge-invariant perturbation variables, representing, e.g., the fractional spatial energy density gradient on hypersurfaces of constant expansion, are used to simplify the linear perturbation analysis of a…
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…
Inflation offers a simple model for very early evolution of our Universe and the origin of primordial perturbations on large scales. Over the last 25 years we have become familiar with the predictions of single-field models, but inflation…
We briefly discuss cosmic inflation, which is the dominant paradigm for the generation of the large scale structure in the Universe and also for arranging for the initial conditions of the hot Big Bang. We then present quintessential…
This is a very comprehensible review of some key issues in Modern Cosmology. Simple mathematical examples and analogies are always used, whenever available. The starting point is the well know Big Bang Cosmology (BBC). We deal with the…
Detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background indicate the large-scale homogeneity of the universe. On very small scales, we observe however inhomogeneities such as galaxies, stars, planets and ourselves. In the context of hot…
Modern cosmology has created a tight link between particle physics / field theory and a wealth of new observational data on the structure of the Universe. These lecture notes focus on some of the most important aspects concerning the…
We review the status of bouncing cosmologies as alternatives to cosmological inflation for providing a description of the very early universe, and a source for the cosmological perturbations which are observed today. We focus on the…
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
We extend the theory of cosmological perturbations to the case when the ``matter'' Lagrangian is an arbitrary function of the scalar field and its first derivatives. In particular, this extension provides a unified description of known…
These notes are intended as an introductory course for experimental particle physicists interested in the recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology. I will describe the standard Big Bang theory of the evolution of the universe, with…
In these notes we present a selection of topics, each section approximately amounting to one lecture. We begin with a brief recapitulation of General Relativity, and the Standard Model of Cosmology. This is followed by lectures on important…
This paper is intended to offer a pedagogical treatment of cosmological modeling and inflationary cosmology. In recent years, inflation has become accepted as a standard scenario making predictions that are testable by observations of the…