A Status Review of Inflationary Cosmology

Abstract

The first aim of this lecture is to highlight two areas of recent progress in inflationary cosmology, namely reheating and the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations. The second aim is to discuss important conceptual problems for the current realizations of inflation based on fundamental scalar matter fields, and to present some new approaches at solving these problems.

Comments: 20 pages invited lecture at JGRG10, Osaka, Japan, Sept. 11 - 14, 2000, to appear in the proceedings