Inflation After WMAP

Abstract

I examine the status of inflationary cosmology in light of the first-year data from the WMAP satellite, focusing on the simplest models of inflation: those driven by a single scalar field. The WMAP observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background is the first unified, self-consistent data set capable of putting meaningful constraints on the inflationary parameter space. WMAP provides significant support for the inflationary paradigm in general, and single-field slow-roll inflation models provide a good fit to existing observational constraints.