Related papers: The Beginning and Evolution of the Universe
These lecture notes introduce the reader to the hot big bang model, cosmological perturbations, gravitational waves, the cosmic microwave background, inflation, the singularity problem, the cosmological constant problem and the cosmology of…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
The first aim of this lecture is to highlight two areas of recent progress in inflationary cosmology, namely reheating and the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations. The second aim is to discuss important conceptual problems for the…
An overview is given of the current status of the theory and observations of the acceleration of the expansion of the observable part of the Universe. Contents 1. Historical Introduction 2. Friedmann equations and cosmological acceleration…
Modern cosmology has sharpened questions posed for millennia about the origin of our cosmic habitat. The age-old questions have been transformed into two pressing issues primed for attack in the coming decade: How did the Universe begin?…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
We propose a cosmological scenario which describes the evolution history of the universe based on the particle creation and holographic equipartition. The model attempts to solve the inflation of the early universe and the accelerated…
Research over the past 25 years has led to the view that the rich tapestry of present-day cosmic structure arose during the first instants of creation, where weak ripples were imposed on the otherwise uniform and rapidly expanding…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…
According to the inflationary scenario of cosmology, all structure in the Universe can be traced back to primordial fluctuations during an accelerated (inflationary) phase of the very early Universe. A conceptual problem arises due to the…
The characteristics of the cosmic microwave background provide circumstantial evidence that the hot radiation-dominated epoch in the early universe was preceded by a period of inflationary expansion. Here, we show how a measurement of the…
Recent developments in cosmology suggest that much of the universe is in a state of explosive, accelerated expansion, called inflation. We live in a "bubble" where inflation has ended, and other bubbles with diverse properties are…
This article discusses density perturbations in inflationary models, offering a pedagogical description of how these perturbations are generated by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. A key feature of inflation is that that rapid…
We review the latest developments in the determination of the cosmological parameters from the measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) anisotropies and of the Large Scale Structure (LSS) of the Universe. We comment…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
These lecture notes aim to provide an introduction to dark matter from the perspective of astrophysics/cosmology. We start with a rapid overview of cosmology, including the evolution of the Universe, its thermal history and structure…
We propose a cosmological model in which the universe undergoes an endless sequence of cosmic epochs each beginning with a `bang' and ending in a `crunch.' The temperature and density are finite at each transition from crunch to bang.…
In this concise, albeit subjective review of structure formation, I shall introduce the cosmological standard model and its theoretical and observational underpinnings. I will focus on recent results and current issues in theoretical…
Our current understanding of the Universe is established through the pristine measurements of structure in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the distribution and shapes of galaxies tracing the large scale structure (LSS) of the…
The evolution of matter in the expanding FRW universe during the time interval between the end of inflation and the beginning of the radiation-dominated era is studied. A constraint between the global geometry and total amount of matter in…