Topics in Cosmology
arXiv:hep-th/0701157
Abstract
These lectures present a brief review of inflationary cosmology, provide an overview of the theory of cosmological perturbations, and then focus on the conceptual problems of the current paradigm of early universe cosmology, thus motivating an exploration of the potential of string theory to provide a new paradigm. Specifically, the string gas cosmology model is introduced, and a resulting mechanism for structure formation which does not require a period of cosmological inflation is discussed.
Invited lectures at the Summer School on Particle Physics, Gravity and Cosmology (Dubrovnik, August 2006), publ. in the on-line proceedings (PoS(P2GC)007). 46 pages, 5 figures
References in corpus (50)
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- Towards the Theory of Reheating After Inflation
- Reheating after Inflation
- The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as the Weakest Force
- Universe Reheating after Inflation
- The Trans-Planckian Problem of Inflationary Cosmology
- Dumb Holes and the Effects of High Frequencies on Black Hole Evaporation
- The Emergent Universe: inflationary cosmology with no singularity
- Hawking Spectrum and High Frequency Dispersion
- Eternal inflation and the initial singularity
- The Robustness of Inflation to Changes in Super-Planck-Scale Physics
- The Emergent Universe: An Explicit Construction
- Gauge invariant MSSM inflaton
- Producing a Scale-Invariant Spectrum of Perturbations in a Hagedorn Phase of String Cosmology
- Power Spectra in Global Defect Theories of Cosmic Structure Formation
- Brane Gases in the Early Universe
- A Cosmological Theory without Singularities
- Topological Defects and Structure Formation
- Trans-Planckian dispersion and scale-invariance of inflationary perturbations
- Parametric Amplification of Gravitational Fluctuations During Reheating
- Tensor Modes from a Primordial Hagedorn Phase of String Cosmology
- Cosmic microwave background measurements can discriminate among inflation models
- Parametric Amplification of Metric Fluctuations During Reheating in Two Field Models
- Cosmological Creation of D-branes and anti-D-branes
- String Gas Cosmology and Structure Formation
- Non-perturbative Gravity, Hagedorn Bounce & CMB
- Causality, randomness, and the microwave background
- Topological Defects as Seeds for Eternal Inflation
- Massless Metric Preheating
- Back-Reaction and the Trans-Planckian Problem of Inflation Revisited
- Is there an imprint of Planck scale physics on inflationary cosmology?
- On T-Duality in Brane Gas Cosmology
- Isotropization in Brane Gas Cosmology
- Interaction Rates in String Gas Cosmology
- Why do we live in 3+1 dimensions?
- Introduction to Cosmic F- and D-Strings
- Relaxing to Three Dimensions
- Back Reaction of Cosmological Perturbations and the Cosmological Constant Problem
- Moduli Stabilization in String Gas Cosmology
- Holography and the scale-invariance of density fluctuations
- On the Initial Conditions for Brane Inflation
- Inflationary Cosmology: Progress and Problems
- Challenges for String Gas Cosmology
- Inflation Free, Stringy Generation of Scale-Invariant Cosmological Fluctuations in D = 3 + 1 Dimensions
- Conceptual Problems of Inflationary Cosmology and a New Approach to Cosmological Structure Formation
- A Principle to Determine the Number (3 + 1) of Large Spacetime Dimensions
- Adiabatic Gravitational Perturbation During Reheating
- S-duality in String Gas Cosmology
- A new Contribution to Cosmological Perturbations of some Inflationary Models
- Anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background: Theoretical Foundations