Recent Progress in Inflationary Cosmology

Abstract

We discuss two important modifications of inflationary paradigm. Until very recently we believed that inflation automatically leads to flatness of the universe, Omega = 1. We also thought that post-inflationary phase transitions in GUTs may occur only after thermalization, which made it very difficult to have baryogenesis in GUTs and to obtain superheavy topological defects after inflation. We will describe a very simple version of chaotic inflation which leads to a division of the universe into infinitely many open universes with all possible values of Omega from 1 to 0. We will show also that in many inflationary models quantum fluctuations of scalar and vector fields produced during reheating are much greater than they would be in a state of thermal equilibrium. This leads to cosmological phase transitions of a new type, which may result in an efficient GUT baryogenesis, in a copious production of topological defects and in a secondary stage of inflation after reheating.

21 pages, An invited talk at the 1st RESCEU International Symposium on "The Cosmological Constant and the Evolution of the Universe," Tokyo, November 1995

References in corpus (11)

• Reheating after Inflation
• Density Perturbations and Black Hole Formation in Hybrid Inflation
• From the Big Bang Theory to the Theory of a Stationary Universe
• Predictions from Quantum Cosmology
• Non-Thermal Phase Transitions after Inflation
• The Graceful Exit Problem in String Cosmology
• INFLATION WITH VARIABLE OMEGA
• Nonperturbative Amplifications of Inhomogeneities in a Self-Reproducing Universe
• Preheating, Supersymmetry Breaking and Baryogenesis
• Can the Simplest Two-Field Model of Open Inflation Survive?
• Open Inflationary Universes in the Induced Gravity Theory