Teaching

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Talks and Notes

Early Universe I

I only did week 3 while David Parkinson was away

Decoupling and the Boltzmann equation

Early Universe II

Five weeks covering:

Problems with the hot big bang
Inflation and various inflation models
Cosmological perturbation theory
Quantum generation of perturbations in inflation
Power spectrum predictions from inflation
Perturbation evolution and growth after reheating
Free streaming and Silk damping
Form of the dark matter power spectrum
CMB and observations (week 5 by David Parkinson)

See the Course directory for timings etc.

Notes (still being worked on; latest version on this page):

Inflation and generation of perturbations (adapted from notes by David Parkinson and Martin Kunz)
Perturbation evolution and structure formation
Week 5 notes will be provided by David Parkinson

Animations

Extra off-syllabus material

Some of the derivations are rather long, and not included in the notes or lectures, e.g. the perturbed Einstein equations and the second order action for calculation the fluctuations in inflation. The course only aims to cover the starting point and results, and important physics, rather than lots of tedious calculation of Christoffel symbols. If you are interested here are some Maple worksheets using GRTensor for calculating some of these results. Sorry these are not well documented, and in some places well beyond the level of the course

GRTensor Metric for Conformal Newtonian Gauge
GRTensor Metric for tensor modes
Scalar second order action
Tensor second order action
Stress-energy conservation and Einstein equations

There are also some excellent notes by Anthony Challinor, which give full derivations of many things covered in the course, though going significantly beyond it in places. For the most part the notation is consistent. You can also find full derivations in Weinberg's Cosmology.