TASI Lectures on Primordial Cosmology

Abstract

These lectures cover aspects of primordial cosmology with a focus on observational tests of physics beyond the Standard Model. The presentation is divided into two parts: In Part I, we study the production of new light particles in the hot big bang and describe their effects on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background. In Part II, we investigate the possibility of very massive particles being created during inflation and determine their imprints in higher-order cosmological correlations.

77 pages, 31 figures. This is an extended write up of lectures given at TASI 2017

References in corpus (11)

• A Joint Analysis of BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck Data
• Primordial Non-Gaussianities from Inflation Models
• Light Sterile Neutrinos: A White Paper
• CMB-S4 Science Book, First Edition
• Cosmological Collider Physics
• The "in-in" Formalism and Cosmological Perturbations
• Partially Massless Fields During Inflation
• Searching for Light Relics with Large-Scale Structure
• First Constraint on the Neutrino-Induced Phase Shift in the BAO Spectrum
• What is mass in desitterian physics?
• Lecture Notes on CMB Theory: From Nucleosynthesis to Recombination

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Primordial Black Holes from a tiny bump/dip in the Inflaton potential
• Dark matter from an even lighter QCD axion: trapped misalignment
• Bayesian inflationary reconstructions from Planck 2018 data
• The DFSZ axion in the CMB
• Cosmological Implications of Axion-Matter Couplings
• Minimal plateau inflationary cosmologies and constraints from reheating
• Primordial Gravitational Wave Circuit Complexity
• Non-Gaussianity from $X,Y$ gauge bosons in Cosmological Collider Physics
• Time-dependent quantum correlations in two-dimensional expanding spacetime
• Holographic time-dependent entanglement entropy in $p$-brane gas geometries
• A Tail of Eternal Inflation