The CMB and Cosmological Perturbation Theory

Astro 448

MTh 3:00-4:20 AAC 123

This course will have a heavy emphasis on the theory of cosmic microwave background anisotropies.

Requirements for this course are the Ast 321 or the physics dept cosmology course. Rudimentary GR knowledge will be assumed - FRW metric, tensor index manipulation.

There will be approximately 1-2 problems or paper reading per week as homework. There will be no final or final project but the final problem set will be more extensive.

Note I will be away October 7 so class will be cancelled that day. I will try to make up the difference later on.

There will be a special lecture November 11 by Stephan Meyer on CMB experiments.

Complete Lecture Notes

Problem Sets

Problem Set 1: hands on with CMBfast

Problem Set 2: Thomson scattering, tight coupling approximation

Problem Set 3: External potentials and the Green's Method

Problem Set 4: Polarization and coordinate transformations

Problem Set 5: Reading assignment: Bardeen (1980)

Problem Set 6: Scalar Fields I

Problem Set 7: Scalar Fields II

Problem Set 8: Final problem set

Crude Road Map

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

Week 9