No Arabic abstract
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.
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.
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.
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 .
In F-theory compactifications, the abelian gauge sector is encoded in global structures of the internal geometry. These structures lie at the intersection of algebraic and arithmetic description of elliptic fibrations: While the Mordell--Weil lattice is related to the continuous abelian sector, the Tate--Shafarevich group is conjectured to encode discrete abelian symmetries in F-theory. In these notes we review both subjects with a focus on recent findings such as the global gauge group and gauge enhancements. We then highlight the application to F-theory model building.