Related papers: Cosmology: Theory and Observations
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
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…
I describe and analyze the various energy scales that emerge from studying the structure of the Standard Models of particle physics and cosmology. Remarkably, save for the scale of the cosmological vacuum energy, all the scales below the…
The observational evidence for the recent acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete---if not incorrect---and that new physics is out there, waiting to be discovered. A…
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
The confrontation between general relativity (and its theoretically most plausible deviations) and experimental or observational results is summarized. Some discussion is devoted to the various methodologies used in confronting theory and…
This is a review article for The Review of Particle Physics 2010 (aka the Particle Data Book). It forms a compact review of knowledge of the cosmological parameters at the beginning of 2010. Topics included are Parametrizing the Universe;…
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…
Although the cosmological constant has primarily cosmological consequences, its smallness poses one of the basic problems in particle physics. Various attempts have been made to explain this mystery, but no satisfactory solution has been…
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,…
The standard model of particle physics is marvelously successful. However, it is obviously not a complete or final theory. I shall argue here that the structure of the standard model gives some quite concrete, compelling hints regarding…
This is a brief review for particle physicists on cosmological impact of neutrinos and on restrictions on neutrino properties from cosmology. The paper includes discussion of upper bounds on neutrino mass and possible ways to relax them,…
From higher dimensional theories, e.g. string theory, one expects the presence of non-minimally coupled scalar fields. We review the notion of conformal frames in cosmology and emphasize their physical equivalence, which holds at least at a…
We discuss scientific realism from the perspective of modern cosmology, especially primordial cosmology: i.e. the cosmological investigation of the very early universe. We first (Section 2) state our allegiance to scientific realism, and…
The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss…
A brief review is given of the present observational data in cosmology. A review of a new bimetric gravity theory with multiple light cones is presented. The physical consequences of this gravity theory for the early universe are analyzed.
The $\Lambda$CDM cosmology passes demanding tests that establish it as a good approximation to reality, but it could be improved. I present a list of possibly interesting and less well explored things that might yield hints to a better…
An extension of the Standard Model by extra scalar singlets was considered. Theoretical (unitarity, vacuum stability, triviality) and cosmological (dark matter relic abundance, direct detection experiments, constraints on dark matter…
Cosmoparticle physics offers the exciting challenge for the new Millenium to come to the true knowledge on the basic natural laws and on the way, they govern the creation and evolution of the Universe with all the forms of its present…
We are at a specific period of modern cosmology, during which the large increase of the amount of data leads to the idea that the determination of cosmological parameters has been achieved with a rather good precision. There is a large…