Related papers: Cosmology as seen from Venice
Cosmological observations have in the past few years become an increasingly powerful method for determining parameters within the neutrino sector, such as the presence of sterile states and the mass of neutrinos. I review the current status…
The current cosmological paradigm, $\Lambda$CDM, is characterized its expansive description of the history of the Universe, its deep connections to particle physics and the large amounts of data that support it. Nonetheless, $\Lambda$CDM's…
Our knowledge about the universe has increased tremendously in the last three decades or so --- thanks to the progress in observations --- but our understanding has improved very little. There are several fundamental questions about our…
While the LCDM framework has been incredibly successful for modern cosmology, it requires the admission of two mysterious substances as a part of the paradigm, dark energy and dark matter. Although this framework adequately explains most of…
In this thesis, I describe a number of recent important developments in neutrino cosmology on three fronts. Firstly, focusing on Large-Scale Structure (LSS) data, I will show that current cosmological probes contain a wealth of information…
Present cosmological observations yield an upper bound on the neutrino mass which is significantly stronger than laboratory bounds. However, the exact value of the cosmological bound is model dependent and therefore less robust. Here, I…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
Observational cosmology is on the verge of new discoveries that will change the essence of our world-view. The matter concerns origin of initial conditions and physics of dark matter.
This is the dawning of the age of precision cosmology, when all the important parameters will be established to one significant figure or better, within the cosmological model. In the age of accurate cosmology the model, which nowadays…
The interplay between cosmology and earth based experiments is crucial in order to pin down neutrino physics. Indeed cosmology can provide very tight, yet model dependent, constraints on some neutrino properties. Here we focus on the…
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…
Keeping in mind the current picture of an accelerating and flat Universe, some specific dynamical models of the cosmological term $\Lambda$ have been selected for investigating the nature of dark energy. Connecting the free parameters of…
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…
A precise measurement of the curvature of the Universe is of primeval importance for cosmology since it could not only confirm the paradigm of primordial inflation but also help in discriminating between different early Universe scenarios.…
I review the challenges and problems facing the standard cosmological model, involving an $\Omega=1$ Universe dominated by non-baryonic dark matter, which arise due to: age estimates of the universe, estimates of the baryon fraction of the…
The widely accepted description of the present cosmic acceleration and the neutrino oscillations in terms of a cosmological constant and neutrino masses, respectively, seems conceptually not very satisfactory. From a phenomenological…
For two decades the hot big-bang model has 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 addressed by the standard cosmology and…
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…
We study the impact of assumptions made about the neutrino mass ordering on cosmological parameter estimation with the purpose of understanding whether in the future it will be possible to infer the specific neutrino mass distribution from…
The current cosmological model, known as the $\Lambda$-Cold Dark Matter model (or $\Lambda$CDM for short) is one of the most astonishing accomplishments of contemporary theoretical physics. It is a well-defined mathematical model which…