Syllabus and Reading assignments (a work in progress) for Ph236 (2006-7) The lectures and class will be following primarily Carroll's and Wald's books. The mapping from other books to my lectures is less clear; recommended readings in MTW, Schutz, and Weinberg are for those who find these books more accessible than Carroll's or Wald's. Fall Quarter: Weeks 1-2: Special relativity; tensor analysis in flat spacetime; accelerated observers READING: Carroll, Ch. 1.1--1.9; Wald, Ch. 1; MTW, Ch. 6; Schutz, Chs. 1--4; Weinberg, Chs. 2.1--2.10. Week 3: Mathematical Framework: Manifolds, Tensors, Etc. READING: Carroll, Ch. 2.1--2.5 and 2.8; Wald, Ch. 2 [except 2.4(b)]. MTW, Ch. 9; Schutz, Chs. 5, 6.1--3; Weinberg, Chs. 4.2--4.9 Week 4: Curvature READING: Carroll, Ch. 3.1--3.4, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.10; Wald, Ch. 3; MTW, Chs. 8-14; Schutz, Chs. 6.4--6.7; Weinberg, Ch. 6. Weeks 5-6: Gravitation; Linearized Gravity, Gravitomagnetism, and Gravitational Lensing READING: Carroll, Chs. 4.1, 4.2, 4.4, 4.7, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.6 (note that 8.6 assumes that you've studied cosmology already and understand what a luminosity distance is; forget about that for now, and just assume that distances are ordinary distances in Minkowski space); Wald, Ch. 4, except for Section 4.4b; MTW, Chs. 16--18, except Section 18.2. Schutz, Ch. 8; Weinberg, Chs. 7.1--7.2, 7.4. Week 7: Energy-momentum and angular-momentum in linear theory; Gravitational waves, generation of GWs, detection, and the quadrupole formula READING: Carroll, Ch. 7.4--7.7; Wald, Ch. 4.4b; MTW, Chs. 18.3, 19.1--19.2, 20, 35--37; Weinberg, Ch. 7.6, 10.1--10.7; Schutz, Ch. 9. Week 8: Symmetries of spacetime and Killing fields; The Schwarzchild Solution; geodesics of Schwarzchild READING: Carroll, Chs. 3.8, 3.9, 5.1--5.5, Appendix B; Wald, Appendix C, Chs. 6.1,6.3; MTW, Chs. 23.1--3, 23.6, 25.1--6, 31.1--4; Schutz, Chs. 10.1, 10.2, 10.4, 11.1, 11.2; Weinberg, Chs. 13.1, 8.1--5, 8.7; Week 9: Causal structure of the Schwarzchild spacetime; spherically symmetric relativistic stars READING: Carroll, Ch. 5.6--5.8; Wald, Ch. 6.2, 6.4. MTW, Ch. 23, 24, 31.5, ; Schutz, Chs. 10.3, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 11.2; Weinberg, Ch. 11. Winter quarter: Week 1: Rotating and charged black holes READING: Carroll, Ch. 6; Wald, Ch. 12 Weeks 2-5: Cosmology: Friedmann-Robert-Walker Universe; classical cosmological tests READING: Carroll, Ch. 8; Wald, Ch. 5. We will be going a bit more in depth than either of these chapters provides. You may also wish to consult (in addition to the class notes) Chs 1-2 of Dodelson's "Modern Cosmology," Ch 13 or Peebles' "Principles of Physical Cosmology," and Chs 2-5 of Kolb and Turner's Early Universe. Ch. 2 in Liddle and Lyth's "Cosmological Inflation and Large-scale structure," may also be useful, and there may be sections of Peacock's "Cosmological Physics". Week 5-6 Field theory, Lagrangian formulation, scalar-tensor theories; Post-Newtonian approximation and solar-system tests READING: Carroll, 1.10, 4.3, 4.8; Wald, Appendix E Week 7: Symmetries, causal structure, singularities READING: Carroll, 2.7, 5.7, 6.2, 6.3, 6.5, 6.6, 8.1, and Appendix H; Wald, Chs. 8-9 Week 8: Differential forms, tetrads, and noncoordinate bases READING: Carroll, 2.9, 2.10, Appendix J; Wald, 3.4(b) and Appendix B.1, and also 6.1. Week 9: Quantum fields in curved spacetime READING: Carroll, Ch. 9; Wald, Ch. 14 Spring quarter: Week 1: Relativistic cosmological perturbations. Perturbations to the FRW metric, perturbed stress-energy tensor, syncrhonous gauge, Poisson gauge, and conformal Newtonian gauge. suggested reading: Carroll, Ch 7.2; Ch. 5 in Dodelson; Chapter 4 in Bertschinger's "Cosmological Dynamics" (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9503125). Week 2: Statistics of CMB temperature/polarization fluctuations Suggested reading: "Theory of Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization," P. Cabella and M. Kamionkowski, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0403392 parts 1-6 Week 3: CMB fluctuations from gravitational waves (tensor metric perturbations); Suggested reading: "Theory of Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization," P. Cabella and M. Kamionkowski, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0403392 parts 7- Week 4: Inflation. Problems with standard hot big-bang; inflationary dynamics. Suggested reading: Carroll, 8.8; Kolb and Turner, Ch. 8; Dodelson, Ch. 6; Liddle and Lyth, Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale Structure, Ch. 3; Peebles, Ch. 17. Week 5: Production of density perturbations and gravitational waves during inflation. 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. Week 6-7: Gravitational lensing and also CMB power spectra. Suggested reading: Dodelson, Chs. 8 and 10; Carroll, 7.3 and 8.6. Cabella and Kamionkowski, astro-ph/0403392, Sections 8 and 9. Liddle and Lyth, Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale Structure, Ch. 5. ``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 8: Growth of linear density perturbations; Jeans instability, peculiar velocities; spherical top-hat collapse; correlation functions and the power spectrum; suggested reading: 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 9: More on structure formation: halo abundances (Press-Schechter theory) and the 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: Assorted chapters 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. Other topics???: energy conditions Raychaudhuri equation 1/R gravity, cosmology, mapping to scalar-tensor, solar-system tests DGP theory of gravity and cosmology gravitational-wave detection more on gravitational-wave sources Inflation Inflationary density perturbations Cosmic microwave background fluctuations Cosmic shear and CMB fluctuations CMB data-analysis techniques light-cone coordinates elements of string theory more on cosmological perturbations, the CMB accelerating Universe, quintessence, tracker models Energy conditions and phantom energy Extra dimensions accretion disks effective field-theory approach tetrads, differential forms, Ricci rotation coefficients.... numerical relativity LAST UPDATED 30 April 2007