From Inflation to Hot Big Bang: A Tutorial on Cosmological Perturbations (Lecture Notes in Physics, 1047)

This open access book offers a concise yet pedagogic introduction to the theory of cosmological inflation and the early epochs that follow it.Inflation explains how the seeds for density perturbations could have formed during a period of exponential expansion.Apart from density perturbations, also so-called tensor perturbations are generated, which may be observed as gravitational waves.Starting from the Einstein equations of general relativity, the formalism is developed through explicit computations and a careful explanation of both the mathematics and the physics involved, paying special attention to general-relativistic gauge invariance.For technically cumbersome steps, examples of numerical and symbolic computer scripts are provided.We also discuss the issue of thermalization, by which a part of the energy density driving the exponential expansion can eventually be converted into the conventional hot big bang.The book is primarily aimed at graduate students of theoretical high-ene