Physical Cosmology

Introductions

Appetizer/Previews

The Golden Age of Physical Cosmology

• Course title: P. J. E. Peebles, Dave Schramm and Rocky Kolb
• current status: precision ignorance

Foundations

• Hubble's law and its tensions
• General Relativity
• Relativistic cosmology: lifestyles in an expanding universe

The Homogeneous Universe

• Dark energy: evidence, consequences
• Cosmic microwave background
• Primordial nucleosynthesis of the light elements, e.g., as seen here (Izotov+ 1999)
• Particle dark matter
  possible terrestrial production events
  observation: direct detection here and here;
  and indirect detection here and here
• Inflation: smoothness and wrinkles

Inhomogeneous Universe

• the Planck sky: teperature and polarization; journey of a CMB photon; Planck dark matter map
• Large scale structure observed
• Structure formation theory and simulations: large scales, galaxy clusters
• origins of cosmic hierarchy: pretty example, many more
• visible galaxy contents and their origin
• clusters as cosmological tools
• QSOs: supermassive black holes as cosmic lighthouses
• Intergalactic medium and baryonic energy flows

Cosmology at Illinois

• Dark energy survey
• LSST
• South Pole Telescope
• SPIDER/BICEP
• Supernova cosmology
• Cosmolgical simulations
• dark matter physics
• cosmic inflation
• Nuclear and particle cosmology

Syllabus