Inflationary schism after Planck2013

By Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, Abraham Loeb. 2014

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Classic inflation, the theory described in textbooks, is based on the idea that, beginning from typical initial conditions and assuming a simple inflaton potential with a minimum of fine-tuning, inflation can create exponentially large volumes of space that are generically homogeneous, isotropic and flat, with nearly scale-invariant spectra of density and gravitational wave fluctuations that are adiabatic, Gaussian and have generic predictable properties. In a recent paper, we showed that, in addition to having certain conceptual problems known for decades, classic inflation is for the first time also disfavored by data, specifically the most recent data from WMAP, ACT and Planck2013. Guth, Kaiser and Nomura and Linde have each recently published critiques of our paper, but, as made clear here, we all agree about one thing: the problematic state of classic inflation. Instead, they describe an alternative inflationary paradigm that revises the assumptions and goals of inflation, and perhaps of science generally.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59e8b3763ffafafb1837409fb191a44d525a97d9

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Inflationary Cosmology after Planck 2013 (2014, methodology): “After this paper was submitted to the arXiv, Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb (ISL) responded in [206] to the critical evaluation of their work in the paper by Guth, Kaiser and Nomura [170] and also in my lectures.”