Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology

TL;DR

This book provides a comprehensive overview of particle physics and inflationary cosmology, covering developments up to 1990, and discusses recent advances like universe acceleration, flatness, and new inflation models.

Contribution

It compiles and explains key concepts and developments in inflationary cosmology and particle physics, integrating recent progress and new theories up to 1990.

Findings

Confirmation of inflationary predictions by cosmological observations

Development of hybrid and string-based inflation models

Advances in reheating and eternal inflation theories

Abstract

This is the LaTeX version of my book "Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology'' (Harwood, Chur, Switzerland, 1990). I decided to put it to hep-th, to make it easily available. Many things happened during the 15 years since the time when it was written. In particular, we have learned a lot about the high temperature behavior in the electroweak theory and about baryogenesis. A discovery of the acceleration of the universe has changed the way we are thinking about the problem of the vacuum energy: Instead of trying to explain why it is zero, we are trying to understand why it is anomalously small. Recent cosmological observations have shown that the universe is flat, or almost exactly flat, and confirmed many other predictions of inflationary theory. Many new versions of this theory have been developed, including hybrid inflation and inflationary models based on string theory. There was a substantial progress in the theory of reheating of the universe after inflation, and in the theory of eternal inflation. It's clear, therefore, that some parts of the book should be updated, which I might do sometimes in the future. I hope, however, that this book may be of some interest even in its original form. I am using it in my lectures on inflationary cosmology at Stanford, supplementing it with the discussion of the subjects mentioned above. I would suggest to read this book in parallel with the book by Liddle and Lyth "Cosmological Inflation and Large Scale Structure,'' with the book by Mukhanov "Physical Foundations of Cosmology,'' to be published soon, and with my review article hep-th/0503195, which contains a discussion of some (but certainly not all) of the recent developments in inflationary theory.