AST1430H: Cosmology

Cosmology

Course Summary
This is the AST 1430 cosmology graduate course for students interested in cosmology. The goal of this course is to provide a more complete coverage of cosmology, and to develop concepts to the point of calculation. The topics to be covered include a brief introduction to relevant concepts from General Relativity, we will cover our model of an isotropic, homogeneous, expanding Universe, inflation, the origin and nature of the Cosmic Microwave background, Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis and baryogenesis, dark matter, linear perturbation theory, large-scale structure beyond linear perturbation theory, and dark energy.

Course Goals
Students will develop an understanding of diverse concepts in cosmology, and the physics that
governs them. By the end of the semester, students should be able to do all of the following:
• state the basic physical principles that are relevant for the aforementioned physical systems,
and derive equations by applying those principles;
• solve physical equations analytically and numerically, sometimes with the aid of basic mathematical software like Mathematica or Python packages such as NumPy or SciPy;
• visualize quantitative results using plotting software like gnuplot or matplotlib;
• understand some of the scientific discussion in journal articles and astrophysics seminars; and
• present and critique concepts in papers in informal settings like cosmology lunch/coffee discussions.