Anisotropic Inflation and Cosmological Observations

Understand

Recent observations opened up a new window on the inflationary model building.

• As it was firstly reported by the WMAP data, there may be some indications of statistical anisotropy on the CMB map, although the statistical significance of these findings are under debate.
• Motivated by these observations, people begun considering new inflationary models which may lead to statistical anisotropy.
• The simplest possible way to construct anisotropic inflation is to introduce vector fields.