ASTR 5770 Fall 2018 Syllabus

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ASTR 5770 Cosmology Fall 2018: Syllabus

Content

Cosmology is the study of the Universe at large. Over the last several decades cosmology has developed into a huge subject, fueled by observations of ever greater scope and precision.

The Rosetta Stone of modern cosmology is the power spectrum of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The observed power spectrum agrees exquisitely well with the simplest prediction of the theory of inflation. Inflation postulates that the early (first 10⁻³⁴ seconds) Universe was dominated by the vacuum energy of an unknown scalar field, and that perturbations were produced by quantum fluctuations of this field. A major prediction, yet to be confirmed, is that inflation generates gravitational waves that, if the energy scale of inflation is at the GUT scale of 10¹⁶ GeV or above, should be detectable in the B-mode polarization of CMB fluctuations at large angular scales. If detected, such waves offer a window to physics at GUT-scale energies inaccessible to earthly experiment. In 2014 the BICEP2 team claimed a detection of B-mode polarization, but this proved to be from spinning dust in our Galaxy, not primordial.

Although the CMB is the most important observational pillar of modern cosmology, there are many other supporting observations. One of the reasons for confidence is that all the observations put together seem to support the same Standard \(\Lambda\)CDM Model of Cosmology.

This course aspires to cover the following topics (the first item is in capitals because of its importance):

THE LINEAR GROWTH OF FLUCTUATIONS IN PHOTONS, BARYONS, DARK MATTER, AND SPACETIME
General Relativity, applied to cosmology
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
Recombination
WIMPs (Weekly Interacting Massive Particles, the leading contender for Cold Dark Matter)
Cosmic Microwave Background
Inflation
Galaxy clustering
Weak gravitational lensing
Statistical methods

Warning: This is a graduate-level course that will require a serious amount of work on your part. I will cover the mathematics and physics as needed (including the general relativity), but in the lectures I will often have to fast-forward over details, which you can read more about in the texts or the recommended text.