Beyond slow-roll inflation

Cosmic inflation has become an integral part of our currently best-fitting cosmological model, called LCDM for its two major contributions to the energy content, which are a cosmological constant Lambda and cold dark matter. I will start out with a broad overview of cosmic inflation, its motivation for the Hot Big Bang picture and its most simple implementation in the form of a single scalar field that slowly rolls down its potential. I will show how that relates to the phenomenological implementation with 2 or 3 primordial parameters in our current standard LCDM model. Then ultimately I will go beyond the standard assumption of slow-roll initial conditions, which can lead to a finite amount of inflation, and which potentially could have observable effects on the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background.