Overview

Description

COURSE DETAILS:

The course starts with a review of the basic building blocks of the current cosmological model and various types of observations that support it. The main purpose of the course is to cover topics in cosmology that are actively investigated today, both from the theoretical and observational perspectives. While the course is largely self-contained, a basic knowledge of General Relativity will be assumed.  

Topics to be covered:

• Review of the relevant GR basics; the FRW metric; expansion rate with different types
of content; cosmological distances; brief thermal history of the universe
• Evolution of linear perturbations; Boltzmann equation; gauge freedom; scalar, vector and
tensor modes; linear order Einstein equations; numerical and analytical evaluation of the
CMB anisotropy spectrum; main sources of CMB anisotropies; cosmic variance; evolution
of large scale structure; redshift space distortions
• Inflation; the quantum origin of fluctuations; derivation of the initial power spectrum;
tensor modes
• The cosmological constant problem

Optional topics, to be chosen later, time perimitting:

• Spontaneous symmetry breaking; Kibble mechanism; the homotopy group classification;
topological defects – domain walls, cosmic strings; the monopole problem
• Modified gravity models; scalar tensor (ST) theories and the f(R) model; linear perturba-
tions in f(R) and general ST models; phenomenological approaches to linear perturbations
in modified gravity; screening mechanisms in modified gravity; domain walls coupled to
matter
• Statistical methods in cosmology; Fisher matrix forecast for different types of observa-
tions; combining information from different types of observational probes; forecasting con-
straints on unknown functions, principal component analysis; reconstruction of unknown
functions from data
• B-mode polarization of CMB as a probe of fundamental physics: inflation, cosmic strings,
modified gravity, magnetic fields.
• Cosmological magnetic fields; candidate models for the primordial seeds; evolution of
magnetic fields; CMB and other observational signatures
• Non-trivial domain wall solutions; interactions between domain walls and monopoles

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

"Modern Cosmology" by Scott Dodelson.  Required.