Abstract
In the last few decades we have made much progress in understanding the nature and evolution of the early universe, culminating in what we know today as big bang cosmology. While this theory has been quite successful in matching astrophysical observations, there are a few glaring issues, mainly the horizon, flatness and monopole problems. In this talk we discuss cosmic inflation, a theoretical framework that aims to solve these issues by extending the classical big bang picture with a period of exponential expansion. We start by reviewing big bang theory and detail the issues that arise upon deeper analysis. We then introduce the central idea behind inflation, a period of accelerated expansion, and explain how it addresses each issue in turn and lastly we end by explaining how we can achieve the conditions for inflation concretely via a class of models known as single-field slow-roll inflation. The talk aims to introduce the ideas behind inflation and to motivate its efficacy to an audience with varying familiarity with the subject matter by focusing on the simplest type of inflationary model which is still under theoretical investigation.