Advanced General Relativity

Advanced General Relativity (Fall '14)


This course is shared with K. G. Arun. He's teaching a module on gravitational waves. I'll teach a module on cosmology.

Books: many... some refs: Baumann's lectures (including TASI arXiv:0907.5424 [hep-th]), introductory parts of Maldacena astro-ph:0210603.

Introductory stuff -- the cosmological constant and deSitter space; cosmology -- basic data and composition of the universe; homogeneity/isotropy, FRW solutions and their cosmology, the Big-Bang singularity; a brief history of the Universe (the standard model of cosmology).

Problems with standard Big Bang cosmology (flatness, horizon etc); Inflation (basic scenario addressing flatness, horizon problems etc); scalar fields and slow-roll inflation, slow-roll parameters; rudiments of cosmological perturbations, scalar/tensor fluctuation modes, their 2-point correlation functions and power spectra, tensor-to-scalar ratio and (glimpse of) Lyth bound.

short exam and assignments

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