CMB and Structure Formation (Graca Rocha, 8 lectures)

Lecture 1

Cosmological Perturbations I : Newtonian perturbation theory

Lecture 2

Cosmological Perturbations II: Relativistic perturbation theory

Lecture 3

Statistics of Random Fields:

Random fields in 3D Euclidean space; the Power Spectrum; two-point correlation functions; two-point statistics; Gaussian processes; Beyond the Power spectrum; Random fields on the sphere, Non-Gaussianity; non-Gaussianity tools

Lecture 4

Inflation I - Fundamentals of Inflation:

Motivation of Inflation; Scalar Fields; Slow-roll inflation; Exact solutions; The end of inflation

Lecture 5

Inflation II - Fluctuations from Inflation:

Scalar field fluctuations; Curvature perturbation; Equations of motion; Canonical quantisation; Heisenberg equations of motion; Mode expansion; Power Spectra; Predictions for Slow-roll inflation; Spectral index; Classicality and Gaussianity

Topological Defects - Cosmic Strings and structure formation

Lecture 6

The Cosmic Microwave Background I - The physics of the CMB:

Temperature anisotropies; Polarization of the CMB; Anisotropy Power Spectrum; Mechanisms for primary fluctuations: Sachs Wolfe effect, Acoustics Peaks; Silk damping, damping of the CMB power spectrum; tensor perturbations - gravitational waves

Lecture 7

The Cosmic Microwave Background II -

Lecture 8

Large Scale Structure:

Galaxy formation and clustering, non-linear gravitational clustering; The Zeldovich approximation; Press-Schechter theory; the clustering spectrum; biased galaxy formation; etc.

Putting observations together