171.697  PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS  Spring 2012  
             
        ** last update: 6 April 2012

Instructor:
	Marc Kamionkowski, kamion [at] pha.jhu.edu, 6-0373, Bloomberg 439

Times:  Monday,Friday   2:45-4pm room 278



Syllabus:


Week 1:               Cosmology introduction; FRW metric,
   	      	      Friedmann equation; ages, distances,
week of Jan 30        horizons, cosmological parameters
suggested reading:    Chs. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 of Longair; Chs 1-2 of
                      Dodelson's book.  Ch. 2, 3.1, 3.2, and 3.6 of
                      Kolb-Turner.


Week 2:               Neo-classical cosmological tests---number
        	      counts, distance-redshift relations,
week of Feb 6  	      Alcock-Paczynski test, quasar-lensing
        	      statistics
suggested reading:    Ch 13 of Peebles'
                      "Principles of Physical Cosmology", and
                      Chs 2-3 of Kolb and Turner's "The Early
                      Universe" are also good.  Chs 1-2 of
                      Dodelson's book.  Ch. 8 of Longair.

Week 3:		      Thermodynamics in an expanding Universe
   	      	      and thermal history. neutrino decoupling,
week of Feb 13 	      thermal relics, recombination and the CMB
        	      spectrum, big-bang nucleosynthesis, baryogenesis,
        	      Gunn-Tremaine bound
suggested reading:    Ch. 3 in Dodelson's book.  Chs. 3-5 in
                      Kolb and Turner's The Early Universe.
                      Assorted sections in Peebles' Principles
                      of Physical Cosmology cover what we're
                      doing this week, but not in one place.
                      Chs 9-10 in Longair.  There may also be relevant
                      parts to Peacock's Cosmological
                      Physics.

Week 4:		      Growth of linear density perturbations;
   	      	      Jeans instability,
week of Feb 20	      peculiar velocities; spherical top-hat
        	      collapse; correlation functions and the
        	      power spectrum; 
suggested reading:    Chs. 11-14 in Longair; assorted sections
                      in Peebles, although there's no
                      one-to-one correspondence between his
                      organization and ours.  Chs. 15-17 in
                      Peacock's "Cosmological Physics".  Ch. 9
                      in Kolb and Turner.

Week 5:		      More on structure formation: halo abundances
   	      	      (Press-Schechter theory) and the
week of Feb 27 	      luminosity function; biasing, Gaussian versus
        	      non-Gaussian initial conditions;
        	      redshift-space distortions; the Limber
        	      approximation; nonlinear evolution of the
        	      power spectrum; Zeldovich approximation;
        	      galaxy formation
suggested reading:    Chs. 11-14 in Longair; assorted sections
                      in Peebles, although there's no
                      one-to-one correspondence between his
                      organization and ours.  Chs. 15-17 in
                      Peacock's "Cosmological Physics".  Ch. 9
                      in Kolb and Turner.

Week 6:		      inflation: basic dynamics and density
	      	      perturbations; CMB fluctuations: power
week of March 5	      spectra, correlation functions,
       		      polarization, predictions and
       		      observations; baryon wiggles in the
       		      matter power spectrum

Week 7:		      gravitational lensing: strong lensing,
  	      	      weak lensing and cosmic shear,
week of Mar 12 	      gravitational microlensing
suggested reading:    Peacock's "Cosmological Physics," Chapter
                      2.  Blandford-Narayan, Ann Rev Astron
  	      	      Astrophys 300, 311 (1992).  Chs. 7.3 and
  	      	      8.6 in Carroll's general relativity book.

SPRING BREAK
week of Mar 19

*TENTATIVE* Syllabus for rest of class.  highly likely to change
 in detail

Week 8:               Relativistic cosmological perturbations.
week of Mar 26        Perturbations to the FRW metric,
                      perturbed stress-energy tensor,
                      syncrhonous gauge, Poisson gauge, and
                      conformal Newtonian gauge.
suggested reading:    Chapter 4 in Bertschinger's "Cosmological
                      Dynamics"
		      (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9503125).
		      See also Sean Carroll's general relativity
		      book, Ch 7.2;  Ch. 5 in Dodelson.


Week 9:	      	      Statistics of CMB temperature fluctuations
week of Apr 2        
suggested reading:    Lecture notes....CMB sections of various books
		

Week 10:      	      Theory of CMB temperature fluctuations
            	      from inflation
week of Apr 9       
suggested reading:    Dodelson 6.4--6.6; Liddle and Lyth, {\it
                      Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale
                      Structure}, Ch. 7; Carroll, 8.8; Kolb and
                      Turner, Ch. 8; Peebles, Ch. 17.
                      ``Anisotropies in the cosmic microwave
                      background: an analytic approach,'' by
                      W. Hu and N. Sugiyama, Astrophys. J. 444,
                      489 (1995) [arXiv:astro-ph/9407093]. 


Week 11:	      Statistics of CMB Polarization
week of Apr 16:	      
suggested reading:    "Theory of Cosmic Microwave Background
                      Polarization," by Cabella and Kamionkowski,
		      http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0403392,
		      parts 1-6
		
Week 12:	      CMB polarization by from gravitational
Week of Apr 23:	      waves and lensing of CMB polarization by
           	      density perturbations
suggested reading:    "Theory of Cosmic Microwave Background
                      Polarization," by Cabella and Kamionkowski,
		      http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0403392,
		      parts 7-10

Week 13:	      Alternative-gravity theories:
Week of Apr 30	      Scalar-tensor theories, f(R) gravity,
               	      extra dimensions, and maybe massive gravity
suggested reading:    Carroll's general-relativity book, 1.10, 4.3, 4.8