Related papers: Cosmology Solved? Quite Possibly!
Departures of the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from a perfect blackbody probe a fundamental property of the universe -- its thermal history. Current upper limits, dating back some 25 years, limit such spectral…
Cosmology requires new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles and fields. What is the fundamental physics behind dark matter and dark energy? What generated the initial fluctuations in the early Universe? Polarised light…
Big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), today a pillar of modern cosmology, began with the trailblazing 1948 paper of Alpher, Bethe and Gamow. In it, they proposed non-equilibrium nuclear processes in the early Universe ($t \sim 1000\,$sec) and an…
One of the most spectacular scientific breakthroughs in past decades was using measurements of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to test precisely our understanding of the history and composition of the Universe.…
The Universe is the grandest conceivable scale on which the human mind can strive to understand nature. The amazing aspect of cosmology, the branch of science that attempts to understand the origin and evolution of the Universe, is that it…
Fluctuations in the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe each contain clues about the nature of the earliest moments of time. The next generation of…
Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of our Universe. It is 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;…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies have and will continue to revolutionize our understanding of cosmology. The recent discovery of the previously predicted acoustic peaks in the power spectrum has established a…
Inflation provides a unified paradigm for understanding the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the flatness problem, and the origin of large-scale structure. Although the physics responsible for inflation is not yet well…
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…
We summarize some applications of big bang nucleosythesis (BBN) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to constrain the first moments of the creation of matter in the universe. We review the basic elements of BBN and how it constraints…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) encodes information on the origin and evolution of the universe, buried in a fractional anisotropy of one part in 100,000 on angular scales from arcminutes to tens of degrees. We await the coming…
The conventional $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model supplemented by the inflation concept describes the Universe very well. However, there are still a few concerns: new Planck data impose constraints on the shape of the inflaton potential,…
I review two different connections between particle theory and early-Universe cosmology: (1) Cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) tests of inflation and (2) particle dark matter. The inflationary predictions of a flat Universe and a nearly…
The early stages of the universe evolution are discussed according to the hot big bang model and the grand unified theories. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized and their resolution by inflationary cosmology is sketched.…
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…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a snapshot of the early Universe when matter began to become structured and has been the focus of several recent observational campaigns. In this Perspective, we discuss the results from these…
These lectures describe how the Standard Model of cosmology ($\Lambda$CDM) has developped, based on observational facts but also on ideas formed in the context of the theory of fundamental interactions, both gravitational and…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
The ten's of micro-Kelvin variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation across the sky encode a wealth of information about the Universe. The full-sky, high-resolution maps of the CMB that will be made in…