Cosmology

IUCAA - NCRA Graduate School

To contact me any time, remember that my office phone number is (020) 25719270. In case you want to contact me and do not find me in office, send me an email to tirth-at-ncra-dot-tifr-dot-res-dot-in.
A Google Classroom has been set up for the course where various material will be shared. The link will be shared with only students who are taking the course for credits.
The course is supposed to be consisting of 21 lectures. Every week, there will be three lectures so that the lectures are over by 9 April.
There will be two assignments and one final examination which will be used for evaluating the course. These will have to be scanned (in PDF format) and uploaded to the Google Classroom.
The assignments would be distributed to you, tentatively, on 12 March and 2 April, respectively. You will get about one week to return them back.
The final examination is tentatively scheduled on 19 April 10:00 - 13:00. During the examination, you will be allowed to consult the lecture slides and any notes you have prepared.
The evaluation procedure for the course is as follows: your final grade will be computed giving 50% weightage to the final exam and 50% to the assignments.

The expanding Universe
Relativistic cosmology: FLRW metric
FLRW kinematics (light propagation, distances)
FLRW dynamics (Friedmann equations & solutions, standard model components, observational evidence)
Inflation and scalar fields
Thermal history of the Universe (evolution in equilibrium, decoupling of species, dark matter, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, recombination)

Relativistic linear perturbation theory (scale-dependent dynamics, perturbations in radiation & dark matter, transfer function)
Non-relativistic fluid formulation (linear & quasi-linear evolution of dark matter, linear evolution of baryons)
Non-linear growth: Zel'dovich approximation, spherical collapse
Statistical treatment of linear inhomogeneities (Gaussian random fields, power spectrum)
Statistics of non-linear objects (redshift space distortions, halo mass function, galaxy clustering, galaxy formation)

T. Padmanabhan, Theoretical Astrophysics, Volume III: Galaxies and Cosmology, Cambridge University Press
J. A. Peacock, Cosmological Physics, Cambridge University Press
H. Mo, F. van den Bosch & S. White, Galaxy Formation and Evolution, Cambridge University Press