ASTR 5770 Fall 2014 Syllabus

ASTR 5770 Fall 2014 Homepage

ASTR 5770 Cosmology Fall 2014: Syllabus

Content

The theme of this course is the calculation of the power spectrum of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. The observed power spectrum agrees exquisitely well with the simplest prediction of the theory of inflation. Inflation postulates that the early (first 10⁻³² seconds) Universe was dominated by the vacuum energy of an unknown scalar field, and that perturbations were produced by quantum fluctuations of this field. The BICEP2 team recently claimed a detection of B-mode polarization attributable to gravitational waves generated during inflation. If confirmed, such observations offer a window to physics at GUT-scale energies inaccessible to earthly experiment.

During the semester you will develop by steps, with increasing level of sophistication, a computer program (I recommend Mathematica) to calculate the power spectrum of matter (galaxies) and of the CMB. The computation is a glorious application of intricately interwoven threads of physics. The arena in which the action takes place is general relativistic perturbation theory on a homogeneous, isotropic (Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker) spacetime. The players in the arena are non-baryonic dark matter, baryons, photons, neutrinos, and dark energy, interacting by gravity and, in the case of baryons and photons, by electron-photon (Thomson) scattering.

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 notes or the recommended text.

Final, Presentation

There will be no final as such; rather the final will consist of the final version of the program that you write, along with a write-up illustrating what your program can accomplish.

In lieu of a final program, or in addition to it, you may choose to give a 20 minute presentation, followed by questions, in class, at any time during the semester, on a paper on any aspect of cosmology from the arXiv (astro-ph.CO) in recent years. You will need to book with me in advance a time slot for your presentation. First come, first served.

If you choose to do both the program final and a presentation, your final grade will be the better of the grades for the program and the presentation.

Grading

Grading will be weighted as follows:

Problem Sets	80%
Final/Presentation	20%

Policies

Class and University Policies

CMB from Planck Fall 2014 ASTR 5770 Homepage

syllabus | timetable | problems | notes

Updated 2014 Aug 25