Related papers: Nonstandard cosmologies from physics beyond the St…
Observational Cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in the past decade. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation Measurements of CMB anisotropy and,…
The accelerating expansion of the universe presents an exciting, fundamental challenge to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. I highlight some of the outstanding challenges in both developing theoretical models and…
Standard cosmology has long been plagued by a number of persistent problems. The origin of the apparent acceleration of the cosmic expansion remains enigmatic. The cosmological constant has been reintroduced as a free parameter with a value…
Observational evidence indicating that the expansion of the universe is accelerating has surprised cosmologists in recent years. Cosmological models have sought to explain this acceleration by incorporating `dark energy', of which the…
It has recently been realized that many theories of physics beyond the Standard Model give rise to cosmological histories exhibiting extended epochs of cosmological stasis. During such epochs, the abundances of different energy components…
The good agreement between large-scale observations and the predictions of the now-standard $\Lambda$CDM theory gives us hope that this will become a lasting foundation for cosmology. After briefly reviewing the current status of the key…
The inflationary scenario is not the only paradigm of early universe cosmology which is consistent with current observations. General criteria will be presented which any successful early universe model must satisfy. Various ways, including…
While the standard model accurately describes data at the electroweak scale without inclusion of gravity, beyond the standard model physics is increasingly intertwined with gravitational phenomena and cosmology. Thus gravity mediated…
The Standard Model of Particle Physics (SMPP) is an enormously successful description of high energy physics, driving ever more precise measurements to find "physics beyond the standard model", as well as providing motivation for developing…
These notes are intended as an introductory course for experimental particle physicists interested in the recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology. I will describe the standard Big Bang theory of the evolution of the universe, with…
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…
Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended…
We discuss the possibility that the inflationary paradigm, undoubtfully today's best framework to understand all the present cosmological data, may still have some viable challengers. The underlying idea for such discussions is that…
Today, both particle physics and cosmology are described by few parameter Standard Models, i.e. it is possible to deduce consequence of particle physics in cosmology and vice verse. The former is examined in this lecture, in light of the…
The past few years have seen several breakthroughs in particle astrophysics and cosmology. In several cases, new observations can only be explained with the introduction of new fundamental physics. In this talk I summarize some of these…
Though predictions of the simplest inflationary cosmological models with cold dark matter, flat space and approximately flat initial spectrum of adiabatic perturbations are remarkably close to observational data, we have to go beyond them…
For two decades the hot big-bang model as been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not answered by the standard cosmology and…
With the recent progresses on the Type II supernovae, we attempt to investigate whether there does exist new physics beyond the standard cosmological paradigm, i.e., the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ plus cold dark matter ($\Lambda$CDM).…
The Standard Cosmological Model has experienced tremendous success at reproducing observational data by assuming a universe dominated by a cosmological constant and dark matter in a flat geometry. However, several studies, based on local…
The nature of cosmological dark matter finds its explanation in physics beyond the Standard model of elementary particles. The landscape of dark matter candidates contains a wide variety of species, either elusive or hardly detectable in…