Alternatives to Cosmological Inflation

Abstract

The inflationary paradigm, although very successful phenomenologically, suffers from several conceptual problems which motivate the search for alternative scenarios of early universe cosmology. Here, two possible alternatives will be reviewed. - "string gas cosmology" and the "matter bounce". Their successes and problems will be pointed out.

Comments: 14 pages, 5 figures, to be published in the proceedings of CosPA08