Cosmology

Dietrich Bödeker

Lecture notes, problem sheets

  1. Organization, overview
    Introduction, units
    Fig: Hubble diagram (source)
    Fig: CMB spectrum (PDG 2002)
    Fig: CMB temperature fluctuations (NASA/WMAP Science Team)
    Fig: Primordial abundance of light nuclei (PDG)
    Sheet 1
  2. 1 Expanding Universe 1.1 Newtonian cosmology 1.2 Metric tensor
  3. 1.3 Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric
    Sheet 2
  4. 1.4 Einstein equations
    Fig: DESI 2024 VI: Cosmological Constraints from the Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
    Sheet 3
  5. 1.5 Solutions to the Friedmann equations
  6. 1.6 Propagation of light and particles
    Sheet 4
  7. 1.7 Measuring a(t)
    Hubble-diagram (source)
    Type Ia Supernova at z > 1 (source)
  8. 2 The hot Universe 2.1 Conservation laws
    Sheet 5
  9. 2.2 Equilibrium thermodynamics
    Fig: Effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom (source)
  10. 2.3 Entropy
    Sheet 6
  11. 2.4 Lepton era
  12. 3 Neutrino decoupling and electron-positron annihilation
    Sheet 7
  13. 4 Nucleosynthesis 4.1 Boltzmann equation
  14. 4.2 Boltzmann equation for neutron freeze-out
    Sheet 8
  15. 4.3 Time evolution of neutron concentration
  16. 4.4 Deuterium bottleneck
    Fig: Time evolution of mass fractions (source)
    Fig: Time evolution of number fractions (source)
  17. 4.5 Out-of-equilibrium dynamics
    Sheet 9
  18. 5 Recombination
    Fig: recombination history
    Sheet 10
  19. 5.2 Photon decoupling 6 Electroweak epoch 6.1 Symmetry restauration
  20. 6.2 Phase transitions 6.3 Baryon number violation
    Sheet 11
  21. 7 Baryogenesis 7.1 Sakharov conditions 7.2 Leptogenesis
    Fig: illustration of a sphaleron process
    Fig: leptogenesis history
  22. 7.3 Baryogenesis (J.Vandecasteele)
  23. 8 Dark matter
    Sheet 12
  24. 9 Inflation 9.1 Horizon and flatness problem 9.2 Inflation: the basic picture
  25. 9.3 Solving the horizon problem 9.4 Slow-roll inflation
Astrophysical constants
Physical constants

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