Frontiers of Inflationary Cosmology

Abstract

After a brief review of the theory of cosmological perturbations, I highlight some recent progress in the area of reheating in inflationary cosmology, focusing in particular on parametric amplification of super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations, and on the role of noise in the resonance dynamics (yielding a new proof of Anderson localization). I then discuss several important conceptual problems for the current realizations of inflation based on fundamental scalar matter fields, and review some new approaches at solving these problems.

Comments: 15 pages, invited lecture at the XXI Brazilian National Meeting on Particles and Fields, Oct. 23 - 26, 2000, to be published in the proceedings (special issue, Brazilian Journal of Physics, eds. L. de Paula and M. Menon)