INFLATION AFTER WMAP

Recent measurements of the large-scale cosmic microwave background anisotropy made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission indicate a reflection asymmetry, an axis of evil, a low quadrupole, and a few multipoles deviated from predicted in the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant. All of these may give us a hint about the physics of inflation during the first few e-folds or during the inflating period. Efforts taken along this direction will be reviewed and our recent work will be discussed.

ON POINCARÉ INSTABILITY OF ROTATING STARS AND NUCLEI

The influence of the reflection asymmetry degrees of freedom on the stability of rotating charged or gravitating liquid objects is investigated. The Modified Funny Hills shape parametrization as well as the optimal shapes developed by the Strutinsky group have been used. It is shown that the Poincaré instability can, indeed, appear in rotating gravitating objects, but is quite unlikely in rotating nuclei.

ROLE OF THE ZERO-POINT CORRECTIONS IN FISSION DYNAMICS

The way of evaluating spontaneous fission half-lives of nuclei in a multidimensional deformation space is discussed. The cranking as well as the generator coordinate method were used to obtain the collective inertia tensor and the 'zero-point' corrections to the fission barriers. The fission probability was evaluated within the WKB approximation along the least-action trajectory to fission. The influence on the fission life-times of the dynamics in the pairing degrees of freedom as well as the effect of the higher even-multipolarity shape parameters and the role of the reflection asymmetry is examined.