Inflation and non-equilibrium dynamics

Herman Feshbach is a premier nuclear physicist. Although I do no research in his physics subfield, I have found it useful to apply methods developed in that area to early universe investigations that rely on a field-theoretic description for the time evolution of pure and/or mixed initial states. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, I offer for his enjoyment this essay in which I describe how time-dependent Hartree--Fock methods and their generalizations to mixed states are used in attempts to establish various cosmological scenarios, in particular, inflation. copyright 1989 Academic Press, Inc