|
Home
Cosmology
CosmoCoffee
CAMB
CosmoMC
CMB Lensing
Polarization
Talks and Notes
|
Early Universe
This is a graduate (masters) level course, with nine weeks covering:
- Hot big bang and the FRW model
- Redshifts, distances, Hubble law
- Thermal history, recombination, nucleosynthesis
- Problems with the hot big bang
- Inflation with a scalar field
- 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
- Matter power spectrum
- CMB anisotropies
It is expected that you will have done a previous course in General Relativity. Knowledge of Lagrangian mechanics and quantum field theory is also an advantage, but required results will be quickly introduced when required.
Notes
The first two sets of notes were adapted from notes by David Parkinson and Martin Kunz.
Question sheets:
Worksheet
Animations
There's also a MatLab script for generating 2D Gaussian random fields with a given spectrum (n_s).
Open Note Tests
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
There are also some excellent notes by Anthony Challinor, which give full derivations of many things covered in the latter parts of 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.
|