PHAS0067: Advanced Physical Cosmology
Introductory Reading
Liddle, A. An Introduction to Modern Cosmology. Wiley (2003)
Complementary Reading
1. Mukhanov, V. Physical Foundations of Cosmology. Cambridge (2005)
2. Carroll, S.M. Spacetime and Geometry. Addison-Wesley (2004)
3. Dodelson, S. Modern Cosmology. Academic Press (2003)
4. Liddle, A.R. and Lyth, D.H. Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale Structure. Cambridge (2000)
5. Kolb, E.W. and Turner, M.S. The Early Universe. Addison-Wesley (1990)
6. Weinberg, S. Gravitation and Cosmology. Wiley (1972)
7. Peacock, J.A. Cosmological Physics. Cambridge (2000)
Books denoted with a are particularly recommended for this course.
Andrew Pontzen’s acknowledgements
These notes were originally based on those by Hiranya Peiris (who taught the course until 2015). I’ve expanded and re-written most of them over the last few years based on ongoing student feedback, but the course structure remains the same. Please send any comments or corrections to my email address below.
Hiranya Peiris’s original acknowledgements
These notes are distilled from a variety of excellent presentations of the subject in courses and textbooks I have encountered over the years. It is, of course, a topic that can be treated with a wide range of sophistication and difficulty. I have elected to aim it at an accessible level with more emphasis on developing physical intuition rather than on mathematical principles. In terms of textbooks, it most closely parallels the treatments found in Dodelson and Carroll, which are my current personal favourites, and borrows with gratitude from course notes by (in no particular order) Paul Steinhardt, Paul Shellard, Daniel Baumann, and Anthony Lasenby. I thank Anthony Challinor for reading through a huge sheaf of rough notes and providing helpful comments. I am supported by STFC, the European Commission, and the Leverhulme Trust.
Copyright
These notes are for personal use only and may not be redistributed or reproduced without explicit permission of the authors.