暴涨宇宙论.pptVIP

暴涨宇宙论 李淼 中国科学院理论物理研究所 Cosmic Inflation Miao Li Institute of Theoretical Physics, Academia Sinica The standard cosmological model, the big bang model, has been met with numerous successes, including: (1) Prediction of cosmic microwave background. (2) Prediction of the abundance of light elements such helium and deuterium. (3) Of course, explanation of Hubble’s law. …… Still, the standard big bang model does not explain everything we observe. For example, how the structure we see in the sky formed? Why the universe is as old as about 14 billion years? etc. We need a theory of initial conditions to answer questions that the big bang model does not answer. Inflation was invented to partially answer these questions. Traditionally, three problems associated to the initial conditions are most often quoted: The first problem is called the horizon problem. The second problem is the flatness problem. Unwanted relics. Although to many cosmologists, the most practical use of inflation scenario is the generation of primordial perturbations, it is these three “philosophical” problems that motivated Alan Guth to invent inflation in 1981. We now describe the three problems before presenting the solution offered by inflation. The horizon problem. Start with the Friedmann-Robert-Walker metric The most distant places in early universe at time t we can observe today is given by For a matter-dominated universe, if , then However, the particle horizon at that time, again for a matter-dominated universe, is The ratio of the two is When the light last scattered, z~1000, the above ratiois already quite small. The smaller the t, the smallerthe ratio, this is the horizon problem: why the