相关论文: Prospects of Inflationary Cosmology

Discovered almost forty years ago, inflation has become the leading paradigm for the early universe. Originally invented to avoid the fine-tuning puzzles of the standard model of cosmology, the so-called hot Big Bang phase, inflation has…

Cosmic inflation provides a window to the highest energy densities accessible in nature, far beyond those achievable in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Theoretical insights into the inflationary era and its observational probes may…

The first aim of this lecture is to highlight two areas of recent progress in inflationary cosmology, namely reheating and the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations. The second aim is to discuss important conceptual problems for the…

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…

In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…

It is very difficult to obtain a realistic model of a closed inflationary universe. Even if one fine-tunes the total number of e-folds to be sufficiently small, the resulting universe typically has large density perturbations on the scale…

In this talk we discuss three different issues. First of all, there exist several proposals how to solve cosmological problems by adiabatic expansion of the Universe, without any use of inflation. We explain why these models do not solve…

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…

Cosmic inflation is arguably the most favoured paradigm of the very early Universe. It postulates an early phase of fast, nearly exponential, and accelerated expansion. Inflationary models are capable of explaining the overall flatness and…

The world view suggested by quantum cosmology is that inflating universes with all possible values of the fundamental constants are spontaneously created out of nothing. I explore the consequences of the assumption that we are a `typical'…

We perform a general analysis of the cosmological viability of Geometric Inflation. We show that the evolution of the universe, from inflation to the present day, can be seen from the addition of an infinite tower of curvature invariants…

This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…

Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…

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…

We describe several different regimes which are possible in inflationary cosmology. The simplest one is inflation without self-reproduction of the universe. In this scenario the universe is not stationary. The second regime, which exists in…

Observational tests during the next decade may determine if the evolution of the Universe can be understood from fundamental physical principles, or if special initial conditions, coincidences, and new, untestable physical laws must be…

A new idea of deriving a cosmological term from an underlying theory has been proposed in order to explain the expansion history of the universe. We obtain the scale factor with this derived cosmological term and demonstrate that it…

Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…

On the one hand, inflation is an extremely convincing scenario: it solves most cosmological paradoxes and generates fluctuations that became the seeds for the growth of structures. It, however, suffers from a "naturalness" problem:…

Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…