Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userTASI Lectures on Astrophysical Aspects of Neutrinos
212
0
0.0
(
0
)
Authors
John F. Beacom
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Neutrino astronomy is on the verge of discovering new sources, and this will lead to important advances in astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, and nuclear physics. This paper is meant for non-experts, so that they might better understand the basic issues in this field.
rate research
Read More
This series of lectures gives a pedagogical review of the subject of cosmological inflation. I discuss Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology and the horizon and flatness problems of the standard hot Big Bang, and introduce inflation as a solution to those problems, focusing on the simple scenario of inflation from a single scalar field. I discuss quantum modes in inflation and the generation of primordial tensor and scalar fluctuations. Finally, I provide comparison of inflationary models to the WMAP satellite measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and briefly discuss future directions for inflationary physics. The majority of the lectures should be accessible to advanced undergraduates or beginning graduate students with only a background in Special Relativity, although familiarity with General Relativity and quantum field theory will be helpful for the more technical sections.
These lectures cover aspects of primordial cosmology with a focus on observational tests of physics beyond the Standard Model. The presentation is divided into two parts: In Part I, we study the production of new light particles in the hot big bang and describe their effects on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background. In Part II, we investigate the possibility of very massive particles being created during inflation and determine their imprints in higher-order cosmological correlations.
In these lectures I briefly review the Higgs mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and focus on the most relevant aspects of the phenomenology of the Standard Model Higgs boson at hadron colliders, namely the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. Emphasis is put in particular on the Higgs-physics program of both LHC experiments and on the theoretical activity that has entailed from the the need of providing accurate predictions for both signal and background in Higgs-boson searches.
I introduce the consequences of neutrino mass and mixing in the dense environments of the early Universe and in astrophysical environments. Thermal and matter effects are reviewed in the context of a two-neutrino formalism, with methods of extension to multiple neutrinos. The observed large neutrino mixing angles place the strongest constraint on cosmological lepton (or neutrino) asymmetries, while new sterile neutrinos provide a wealth of possible new physics, including lepton asymmetry generation as well as candidates for dark matter. I also review cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure constraints on neutrino mass and energy density. Lastly, I review how X-ray astronomy has become a branch of neutrino physics in searches for keV-scale sterile neutrino dark matter radiative decay.
These lectures provide an updated pedagogical treatment of the theoretical structure and phenomenology of some basic mechanisms for inflation, along with an overview of the structure of cosmological uplifts of holographic duality. A full treatment of the problem requires `ultraviolet completion because of the sensitivity of inflation to quantum gravity effects, including back reaction and non-adiabatic production of heavy degrees of freedom. Cosmological observations imply accelerated expansion of the late universe, and provide increasingly precise constraints and discovery potential on the amplitude and shape of primordial tensor and scalar perturbations, and some of their correlation functions. Most backgrounds of string theory have positive potential energy, with a rich but still highly constrained landscape of solutions. The theory contains novel mechanisms for inflation, some subject to significant observational tests. Although the detailed ultraviolet completion is not accessible experimentally, some of these mechanisms directly stimulate a more systematic analysis of the space of low energy theories and signatures relevant for analysis of data, which is sensitive to physics orders of magnitude above the energy scale of inflation as a result of long time evolution (dangerous irrelevance) and the substantial amount of data. Portions of these lectures appeared previously in Les Houches 2013, Post-Planck Cosmology .
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
