Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Frequently used symbols
- Preface
- 1 INTRODUCTION
- 2 THE HOT BIG BANG COSMOLOGY
- 3 INFLATION
- 4 SIMPLEST MODEL FOR THE ORIGIN OF STRUCTURE I
- 5 SIMPLEST MODEL FOR THE ORIGIN OF STRUCTURE II
- 6 EXTENSIONS TO THE SIMPLEST MODEL
- 7 SCALAR FIELDS AND THE VACUUM FLUCTUATION
- 8 BUILDING AND TESTING MODELS OF INFLATION
- 9 THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND
- 10 GALAXY MOTIONS AND CLUSTERING
- 11 THE QUASI-LINEAR REGIME
- 12 PUTTING OBSERVATIONS TOGETHER
- 13 OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE
- 14 ADVANCED TOPIC: COSMOLOGICAL PERTURBATION THEORY
- 15 ADVANCED TOPIC: DIFFUSION AND FREESTREAMING
- Appendix: Constants and parameters
- Numerical solutions and hints for selected examples
- References
- Index
1 - INTRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Frequently used symbols
- Preface
- 1 INTRODUCTION
- 2 THE HOT BIG BANG COSMOLOGY
- 3 INFLATION
- 4 SIMPLEST MODEL FOR THE ORIGIN OF STRUCTURE I
- 5 SIMPLEST MODEL FOR THE ORIGIN OF STRUCTURE II
- 6 EXTENSIONS TO THE SIMPLEST MODEL
- 7 SCALAR FIELDS AND THE VACUUM FLUCTUATION
- 8 BUILDING AND TESTING MODELS OF INFLATION
- 9 THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND
- 10 GALAXY MOTIONS AND CLUSTERING
- 11 THE QUASI-LINEAR REGIME
- 12 PUTTING OBSERVATIONS TOGETHER
- 13 OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE
- 14 ADVANCED TOPIC: COSMOLOGICAL PERTURBATION THEORY
- 15 ADVANCED TOPIC: DIFFUSION AND FREESTREAMING
- Appendix: Constants and parameters
- Numerical solutions and hints for selected examples
- References
- Index
Summary
This book
The study of the early Universe came into its own as a research field during the 1980s. Though there had been occasional forays during the seventies and even before that, it was during the 1980s that a wide range of topics, united by the adoption of modern particle physics ideas in a cosmological context, were investigated in detail. This era of study culminated with the publication in 1990 of the classic book The Early Universe by Kolb and Turner, in which the authors described ideas across the whole range of what had become known as particle cosmology or particle astrophysics, including such topics as topological defects, inflationary cosmology, dark matter, axions, and even quantum cosmology.
Although all these topics matured during the 1980s, if we look back at the papers of that era, we are struck by the rarity with which any detailed comparison with observations could be made. In that regard, particle cosmology in the nineties and onward has become a very different subject from what it was during the eighties because, for the first time, there are observations of a quality that seriously constrains some of the possible physics of the early Universe. Those observations are of structure in the Universe, and a starring role among them is played by the first detection of microwave background anisotropies by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, announced in 1992.
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- Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale Structure , pp. 1 - 11Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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