Related papers: Cosmology, inflation, and the physics of nothing
For more seventy years physicists have appreciated that Nature's vacuum is far from empty. The discovery of the Lamb shift in Hydrogen provided dramatic verification of the reality of the quantum vacuum. The advent of gauge theories has led…
We study cosmological solutions for the very early universe beginning at the Planck scale for a universe containing radiation, curvature and, as a simplification of a possible scalar field potential, a cosmological constant term. The…
A basic modern picture of the universe is given here. The lectures start from the historical ideas of a static universe. Then I move on to Newtonian cosmology and derive the main cosmological equations in the framework of Newtonian…
These lectures are intended to give a pedagogical introduction to the main current picture of the very early universe. After elementary reviews of general relativity and of the standard Big Bang model, the following subjects are discussed:…
The standard big bang cosmological model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions are summarized. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with…
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…
The theory of cosmological perturbations has become a cornerstone of modern quantitative cosmology since it is the framework which provides the link between the models of the very early Universe such as the inflationary Universe scenario…
Inflation is a bold and expansive extension of the Standard Cosmology. It holds the promise to extend our understanding of the Universe to within 10^{-32}sec of the big bang and answer most of the pressing questions in cosmology. Its…
Understanding the behavior of the universe at large depends critically on insights about the smallest units of matter and their fundamental interactions. Inflationary cosmology is a highly successful framework for exploring these…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
The theory of cosmological perturbations is the main tool which connects theories of the early universe (based on new fundamental physics such as string theory) with cosmological observations. In these lectures, I will provide an…
In these lectures I focus on early universe models which can explain the currently observed structure on large scales. I begin with a survey of inflationary cosmology, the current paradigm for understanding the origin of the universe as we…
In these lectures the present status of the so-called standard cosmological model, based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm is reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the origin of the cosmological perturbations we see…
Modern cosmology has created a tight link between particle physics / field theory and a wealth of new observational data on the structure of the Universe. These lecture notes focus on some of the most important aspects concerning the…
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…
Informed by a quantum information perspective, we interpret cosmological expansion of space as growing entanglement between underlying degrees of freedom. In particular, we focus on inflationary cosmology, which, while being a successful…
This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant. Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its…
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…
Inflationary cosmology has become one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. Inflation was the first theory within which it was possible to make predictions about the structure of the Universe on large scales, based on causal physics. The…
These lecture notes intend to form a short pedagogical introduction to inflationary cosmology, highlighting selected areas of recent progress such as reheating and the theory of cosmological perturbations. Problems of principle for…