Cosmology Talk

Modelling cosmic inflation

CUPS, 21st August 2020

THANKS FOR COMING!

Special thanks to Ashot Matevosyan for participating in a trial run of the talk and providing useful feedback. Thanks also to the Cambridge University Physics Society (CUPS) for hosting me.

video

Feedback Form

I’d really appreciate it if you could fill up the following feedback form: https://forms.gle/9hDgjruzyFtqfwFJ8

Whether positive or negative, it helps a lot to know what works and what doesn’t, and especially what I should improve the next time.

Resources

My resources:

  • The general page for my project (to be updated) with the notes that I have made for summer project (including relevants parts from GR, Cosmology, QFT, ect) and more.
  • The slides for this talk are here:
Cosmo-talk-slidesDownload

Lecture notes / Courses:

Note: I only know about courses or notes from the Maths Tripos. I’m sure there are many more excellent resources out there.

  • David Tong’s lecture notes. In particular:
    • Part II Cosmology: Section 1 and 3 are relevant for what was covered in the talk. Section 2 is as well interesting, focusing more on particle physics in the history of the universe. (Had I not taken this course last year, this talk wouldn’t have happened.)
    • Part III Quantum Field Theory: Up to section 2 (inclusive) for the content of the talk, I studied up to section 3 for my project.
    • Part III General Relativity: Apart from what is covered in Part II GR, nothing is really necessary for the talk. To understand some parts of my project, the Einstein-Hilbert action and the stress-energy tensor are useful.
  • David Skinner’s notes for Part II Principle of Quantum Mechanics: cover Dirac notation, ladder operators for the harmonic oscillator, and the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures; all of which are need to understand Quantum Field Theory.
  • Ulrich Sperhake’s notes for Part II General Relativity: Help to understand the geometrical properties of the universe (including the metric tensor) and the equations for Cosmology come from here.
  • Part III Cosmology: A deeper look into inflation than in Part II.
  • Part III Field Theory in Cosmology: QFT (free and interacting) in FRW spacetime, correlators, gravitons, etc.

Some related papers: