Encyclopædia Inflationaris

The current flow of high accuracy astrophysical data, among which are the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurements by the Planck satellite, offers an unprecedented opportunity to constrain the inflationary theory. This is however a challenging project given the size of the inflationary landscape which contains hundreds of different scenarios. Given that there is currently no observational evidence for primordial non-Gaussianities, isocurvature perturbations or any other non-minimal extension of the inflationary paradigm, a reasonable approach is to consider the simplest models first, namely the slow-roll single field models with minimal kinetic terms. This still leaves us with a very populated landscape,…