Toward the Inflationary Paradigm: Lectures on Inflationary Cosmology

摘要

Guth's inflationary Universe scenario has revolutionized our thinking about the very early Universe. The inflationary scenario offers the possibility of explaining a handful of very fundamental cosmological facts - the homogeneity, isotropy, and flatness of the Universe, the origin of density inhomogeneities and the origin of the baryon asymmetry, while at the same time avoiding the monopole problem. It is based upon microphysical events which occurred early (t less than or equal to 10 sup -34 sec) in the history of the Universe, but well after the planck epoc (t greater than or equal to 10 sup -43 sec). While Guth's original model was fundamentally flawed, the variant based on the slow-rollover transition proposed by Linde, and Albrecht and Steinhardt (dubbed 'new inflation') appears viable. Although old inflation and the earliest models of new inflation were based upon first order phase transitions associated with spontaneous-symmetry breaking (SSB), it now appears that the inflationary transition is a much more generic phenomenon, being associated with the evolution of a weakly-coupled scalar field which for some reason or other was initially displaced from the minimum of its potential. Models now exist which are based on a wide variety of microphysics: SSB, SUSY/SUGR, compactification of extra dimensions, R sup 2 gravity, induced gravity, and some random, weakly-coupled scalar field. While there are several models which successfully implement the inflation, none is particularly compelling and all seem somewhat ad hoc. The common distasteful feature of all the successful models is the necessity of a small dimensionless number in the model - usually in the form of a dimensionless coupling of order 10 sup -15 . All inflationary scenarios rely upon the assumption that vacuum energy was once dynamically very significant, whereas today there exists every evidence that it is not. 133 refs., 17 figs. (ERA citation 12:034006)