Related papers: Inflation, structure formation and dark matter
Surveys of galaxy clusters provide a promising method of testing models of structure formation in the universe. Within the context of our standard structure formation scenario, surveys provide measurements of the geometry of the universe…
An introduction to modern cosmology is given, focusing on theories for the origin of structure in the Universe. After a brief review of the theory of growth of cosmological perturbations and a summary of some important observational…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
Modern cosmology provides a connection between the physics of particles and fields and observational cosmology. Making use of this link, a wealth of new observational data can be utilized to explore and constrain theories of fundamental…
At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological…
These lectures provide a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the theory of cosmological perturbations generated during inflation which are thought to be the origin of structure in the universe.
Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of the Universe -- spatially flat; accelerating; comprised of 1/3 a new form of matter, 2/3 a new form of energy, with some ordinary matter and a dash of massive neutrinos; and…
In this review I consider several different issues related to inflation. I will begin with the wave function of the Universe. This issue is pretty old, but recently there were some new insights based on the theory of the self-reproducing…
In these lectures I review the present status of the so-called Standard Cosmological Model, based on the hot Big Bang Theory and the Inflationary Paradigm. I will make special emphasis on the recent developments in observational cosmology,…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
We use observational data on the large scale structure (LSS) of the Universe measured over a wide range of scales from sub-galactic up to horizon scale and on the cosmic microwave background anisotropies to determine cosmological parameters…
Massive neutrinos were the first proposed, and remain the most natural, particle candidate for the dark matter. In the absence of firm laboratory evidence for neutrino mass, considerations of the formation of large scale structure in the…
Precision measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and of the clustering of large-scale structure have supposedly confirmed that the primordial density perturbation has a (nearly) scale-invariant spectrum. However…
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…
In gaussian theories of structure formation, the galaxy cluster abundance is an extremely sensitive probe of the density fluctuation power spectrum and of the density parameter, $\Omega$. We develop this theme by deriving and studying in…
We show that both the baryon asymmetry of the Universe and the dark matter abundance can be explained within a single framework that makes use of maximally helical hypermagnetic fields produced during pseudoscalar inflation and the chiral…
Diverse cosmological and astrophysical observations strongly hint at the presence of dark matter and dark energy in the Universe. One of the main goals of Cosmology is to explain the nature of these two components. It may well be that both…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
Over the past decade, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. The observational evidence for the existence of dark matter is reviewed: rotation curves of galaxies, weak lensing…