Related papers: The Road to Precision Cosmology
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
The recently unveiled deep-field images from the James Webb Space Telescope have renewed interest in what we can and cannot see of the universe. Answering these questions requires understanding the so-called "cosmological horizons" and the…
Cosmology now has a standard model - a remarkably simple description of the universe, its contents and its history. A symposium held last September in Cambridge, UK, gave this model a 'health check' and discussed fascinating questions that…
During the past two decades, cosmologists turned to particle physics in order to explore the physics of the very early Universe. The main link between the physics of the smallest and largest structures in the Universe is the idea of…
It is commonly stated that we have entered the era of precision cosmology in which a number of important observations have reached a degree of precision, and a level of agreement with theory, that is comparable with many Earth-based physics…
The complexity and accuracy of current and future precision cosmology observational campaigns has made it essential to develop an efficient technique for directly combining simulation and observational datasets to determine cosmological and…
A brief account of the current cosmological observations is given and their implications for QCDM and $\Lambda$CDM cosmologies are discussed. The nucleosynthesis and the galaxy formation constraints have been used to put limits on…
Astronomy can never be a hard core physics discipline, because the Universe offers no control experiment, i.e. with no independent checks it is bound to be highly ambiguous and degenerate. Thus e.g. while superluminal motion can be…
Observational astronomy has shown significant growth over the last decade and has made important contributions to cosmology. A major paradigm shift in cosmology was brought about by observations of Type Ia supernovae. The notion that the…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…
We are at an interesting juncture in cosmology. With new methods and technology, the accuracy in measurement of the Hubble constant has vastly improved, but a recent tension has arisen that is either signaling new physics or as-yet…
Cosmology can be viewed as geodesic motion in an appropriate metric on an `augmented' target space; here we obtain these geodesics from an effective relativistic particle action. As an application, we find some exact (flat and curved)…
We consider a single field governed expansion of the universe from a five dimensional (5D) vacuum state. Under an appropiate change of variables the universe can be viewed in a effective manner as expanding in 4D with an effective equation…
Over the last decades, observations with increasing quality have revolutionized our understanding of the general properties of the Universe. Questions posed for millenia by mankind about the origin, evolution and structure of the cosmos…
Abridged: The golden age of astrophysics is upon us with both grand discoveries (extra-solar planets, dark matter, dark energy) and precision cosmology. Fundamental understanding of the working of stars and galaxies is within reach, thanks…
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…
The Cosmological Principle (CP) -- the notion that the Universe is spatially isotropic and homogeneous on large scales -- underlies a century of progress in cosmology. It is conventionally formulated through the…
The flat matter dominated Universe that dominated cosmological model building for much of the past 20 years does not correspond to the Universe in which we live. This has profound implications both for our understanding of dark matter, and…
From a modern perspective cosmology is a historical science in so far that it deals with the development of the universe since its origin some 14 billion years ago. The origin itself may not be subject to scientific analysis and…
The discovery of universe's late-time acceleration and dark energy has overseen a great deal of research into cosmological singularities and in this brief review, we discuss all the prominent developments in this field for the best part of…