Inflationary Cosmology: Progress and Problems

Abstract

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 inflationary cosmology are pointed out, and some new attempts at solving them are indicated, including a nonsingular Universe construction by means of higher derivative terms in the gravitational action, and the study of back-reaction of cosmological perturbations.

43 pages, 8 figures Invited lectures at the International School on Cosmology, Kish Island, Iran, Jan. 22 - Feb. 4 1999, to be publ. in the proceedings (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2000)

References in corpus (2)

• On Metric Preheating
• On generation of metric perturbations during preheating

Cited by in corpus (23)

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• Decoupling in an expanding universe: backreaction barely constrains short distance effects in the CMB
• Moduli Stabilization in String Gas Cosmology
• $\alpha$-vacuum and inflationary bispectrum
• Challenges for String Gas Cosmology
• Conceptual Problems of Inflationary Cosmology and a New Approach to Cosmological Structure Formation
• Angular Correlation Functions for Models with Logarithmic Oscillations
• Inflation as a probe of new physics
• Generalized Space-time Noncommutative Inflation
• Degravitation, Inflation and the Cosmological Constant as an Afterglow
• Model-Independent Signatures of New Physics in non-Gaussianity
• A general condition of inflationary cosmology on trans-Planckian physics
• Transplanckian signatures in WMAP3?
• Analytical study of classic models of Hybrid Inflation
• Challenges for Inflationary Cosmology
• BB mode angular power spectrum of CMB from massive gravity
• Adiabatic fluctuations from cosmic strings in a contracting universe
• Topics in Cosmology
• BB mode spectrum of CMB and Inflation