Chandrasekhar Hall

Inflation after Planck and BICEP2

Raghavan Rangarajan

Physical Research Laboratory

Inflation is a brief period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe. It resolves certain problems in cosmology and also generates density fluctuations that can act as the seeds for the formation of galaxies and clusters. Measurements of the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation by satellite and ground based experiments, such as WMAP, Planck and BICEP2, have provided confirmation of the inflationary paradigm and allowed us to rule in or out specific models of inflation. In this talk we shall first discuss these observations and how to relate them to inflation models, and then present the status of various inflation models.