Course Identification

Title:

Cosmology 2

Code:

20221121

Lecturers and Teaching Assistants

Lecturers:

Prof. Kfir Blum

TA's:

Dr. Nitsan Bar

Course Schedule and Location

Year:

2022

Semester:

First Semester

When / Where:

Tuesday, 11:15 - 13:00, Weissman, Seminar Rm A
Thursday, 12:15 - 13:00, Weissman, Seminar Rm A

First Lecture:

26/10/2021

End date:

18/03/2022

Field of Study, Course Type and Credit Points

Physical Sciences: Lecture; Elective; Regular; 4.00 points

Comments

N/A

Prerequisites

Cosmology I

QFT and/or Particle Physics I

(a student without this background can probably survive the course, but with a significant extra load)

Restrictions

Participants:

30

Language of Instruction

English

Attendance and participation

Expected and Recommended

Grade Type

Numerical (out of 100)

Grade Breakdown (in %)

Assignments:

50%

Final:

50%

Evaluation Type

Take-home exam

Scheduled date 1

Date / due date

N/A

Location

N/A

Time

-

Remarks

N/A

Estimated Weekly Independent Workload (in hours)

3

Syllabus

Cosmological perspective on the Standard Model of particle physics: vacuum structure of the SM; false vacuum decay; Higgs metastability. Finite temperature effects: symmetry restoration; cosmological phase transitions; nonconservation of SM anomalous accidental symmetries.

Inflation: aspects of classical and quantum dynamics of fields in curved spacetime; inflation as the origin of cosmological perturbations.

Additional topics (time permits): Leptogenesis; axions; cosmological perspective on grand-unified theories; dark matter.

Learning Outcomes

The course will cover a number of topics in theoretical cosmology.

(1) How does the SM QFT fit in a cosmological perspective? -- we will see that the vacuum structure of the electroweak sector of the SM is nontrivial and interesting. This will lead us to analyze false vacuum decay in QFT.

(2) How does the SM behave, if we try to extrapolate it backwards to very high temperatures?

(3) Inflation: scalar field dynamics in curved spacetime, classically and at the quantum level. Topics such as causal structure and conformal diagrams; Unruh effect, Hawking, and Hawking-Gibbons radiation will be covered. We will study inflation as the origin of cosmological structure.

(4) Additional topics. Depending on time constraints, we will cover other aspects involving a cosmological perspective on BSM physics: Leptogenesis; axions and the strong CP problem; GUT; dark matter.

Reading List

Mukhanov: Physical foundations of Cosmology (main book of the course)

Weinberg: Cosmology

Peskin & Schroeder: Introduction to QFT

Website

N/A