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From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
Wide-angle surveys have been an engine for new discoveries throughout the modern history of astronomy, and have been among the most highly cited and scientifically productive observing facilities in recent years. This trend is likely to…
Observations suggest that nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and exerts negative pressure. Theoretical understanding of this component (`dark energy'), which is driving an accelerated expansion of…
The problem of the cosmic coincidence is a longstanding puzzle. This conundrum may be solved by introducing a coupling between the two dark sectors. In this Letter, we study a coupled quintessence scenario in which the scalar field evolves…
Much of the science case for the next generation of deep, wide-field optical/infrared surveys has been driven by the further study of dark energy. This is a laudable goal (and the subject of a companion white paper by Zhan et al.). However,…
Cosmology now provides unambiguous, quantitative evidence for new particle physics. I discuss the implications of cosmology for supersymmetry and vice versa. Topics include: motivations for supersymmetry; supersymmetry breaking; dark…
Cosmic strings, a hot subject in the 1980's and early 1990's, lost its appeal when it was found that it leads to inconsistencies in the power spectrum of the measured cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. However,…
I consider the relation of explanations for the observed data to testability in the following contexts: observational and experimental detection of dark matter; observational and experimental detection of dark energy or a cosmological…
Ultrastrong coupling between light and matter has, in the past decade, transitioned from theoretical idea to experimental reality. It is a new regime of quantum light-matter interaction, going beyond weak and strong coupling to make the…
Many theories of dark energy and modified gravity give rise to scalar fields that couple derivatively to the energy momentum tensor of matter. This is known as disformal coupling. I will show that laboratory searches for axions are ideally…
The objective of neutrino astronomy, born with the identification of thermonuclear fusion in the sun and the particle processes controlling the fate of a nearby supernova, is to build instruments which reach throughout and far beyond our…
There are many books on the classical subject of special relativity. However, after having spent a number of years, both in relativistic engineering and research with relativity, I have come to the conclusion that there exist a place for a…
We discuss how to formulate a quantum field theory of dark energy interacting with dark matter. We show that the proposals based on the assumption that dark matter is made up of heavy particles with masses which are very sensitive to the…
Observational astrophysics uses sophisticated technology to collect and measure electromagnetic and other radiation from beyond the Earth. Modern observatories produce large, complex datasets and extracting the maximum possible information…
Looking ahead to the next decade and imagining the landscape of astronomy in 2020, it is clear that astronomical surveys, large and small, plus extensive follow-up projects, will be a great engine of progress in our profession. Surveys have…
Despite two decades of tremendous experimental and theoretical progress, the riddle of the accelerated expansion of the Universe remains to be solved. On the experimental side, our understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the…
We review the prospects for probing new physics with neutrino astrophysics. High energy neutrinos provide an important means of accessing physics beyond the electroweak scale. Neutrinos have a number of advantages over conventional…
The history of dark universe physics can be traced from processes in the very early universe to the modern dominance of dark matter and energy. Here, we review the possible nontrivial role of strong interactions in cosmological effects of…
The nanophysics is halfway between the size scales of quantum mechanics and macroscopic physics governed by the laws of Newton and Einstein. The correct definition of nanophysics is the physics of structures and artefacts with dimensions in…
We demonstrate how the two dominant constituents of the Universe, dark energy and dark matter, could possess a large scattering cross-section without considerably impacting observations. Unlike models involving energy exchange between the…