By D Baumann and L McAllister Cambridge University Press
This complete and accessible text, written by two of the leading researchers in the field, provides a modern treatment of inflationary cosmology and its connection to string theory and elementary particle theory.
The past two decades of advances in observational cosmology have brought about a revolution in our understanding of the universe. In particular, deeper studies of the cosmic microwave background have revealed strong evidence for a period of inflationary expansion in the very early universe. At the same time, new developments in string theory have led to a better understanding of inflation in a framework that unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity.
After a brief introduction about observations in favour of the inflationary hypothesis, the volume provides an overview of effective field theory, string theory, and string compactifications. Finally, several classes of models of inflation in string theory are examined in detail.
The background material in geometry and cosmological perturbation theory included in the appendices makes the book self-contained and accessible not only to experienced researchers, but also to graduate students and readers who are new to the field.
