Inflation and String Cosmology

Abstract

After 25 years of its existence, inflationary theory gradually becomes the standard cosmological paradigm. However, we still do not know which of the many versions of inflationary cosmology will be favored by the future observational data. Moreover, it may be quite nontrivial to obtain a natural realization of inflationary theory in the context of the ever changing theory of all fundamental interactions. In this paper I will describe the history and the present status of inflationary cosmology, including recent attempts to implement inflation in the context of string theory.

40 pages, 9 figures, an extended version of my talks at the SLAC Summer School "Nature's Greatest Puzzles," at the conference Cosmo04 in Toronto, at the VI Mexican School on Gravitation, and at the XXII Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in 2004

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• Inflating in a Trough: Single-Field Effective Theory from Multiple-Field Curved Valleys
• Duration of inflation and conditions at the bounce as a prediction of effective isotropic loop quantum cosmolog
• Generating the Observed Baryon Asymmetry from the Inflaton Field
• Lightish but clumpy: scalar dark matter from inflationary fluctuations
• Initial conditions for Inflation in an FRW Universe
• Soft branes in supersymmetry-breaking backgrounds
• Mutated Hilltop Inflation : A Natural Choice for Early Universe
• Stability analysis of inflation with an SU(2) gauge field
• Reconstruction of a Nonminimal Coupling Theory with Scale-invariant Power Spectrum
• Inflationary Dynamics with a Non-Abelian Gauge Field
• End of multi-field inflation and the perturbation spectrum
• Gravitational Waves from Preheating in M-flation
• Exact cosmological solutions of models with an interacting dark sector
• Reconstruction of f(R) models with Scale-invariant Power Spectrum
• Brane Inflation and the Overshoot Problem
• Dynamical breaking of shift-symmetry in supergravity-based inflation
• Analytical Study of Mode Coupling in Hybrid Inflation
• What Planck does not tell us about inflation
• Goldilocks Models of Higher-Dimensional Inflation (including modulus stabilization)
• Emergence of Fluctuations from a Tachyonic Big Bang
• Inflationary equilibrium configurations of scalar-tensor theories of gravity
• Sculpting the Extra Dimensions: Inflation from Codimension-2 Brane Back-reaction
• Quintessential inflation from 5D warped product spaces on a dynamical foliation
• Inflation in String Field Theory
• On solving dynamical equations in general homogeneous isotropic cosmologies with scalaron
• Supersymmetric Horizons at the Edge of Effective Field Theory
• Inflationary study of non-Gaussianity using two-dimensional geometrical measures of CMB temperature maps
• Absence of the Higuchi bound in a family of alternative linear massive spin-2 models
• Decoupling Inflation From the String Scale
• Quantum coherent states in cosmology