General Relativity Phys3725 and Phys 3726

Physics 3726 Cosmology and General Relativity

Contact Information
instructor: E. Swanson
office: 411 Allen Hall
phone: 624-9057
Email: swansone@pitt.edu
course web site: http://fafnir.phyast.pitt.edu/GR
office hours: drop by any time
lectures: 11:00-12:15, Tuesday, 419 Allen Hall
11:00-12:15, Thursday, 319 Allen Hall

Required Text: Cosmology, Steven Weinberg (2008, Oxford University Press)

Suggested Texts

A.R. Liddle and D.H. Lyth, Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale Structure
E.W. Kolb and M.S. Turner, The Early Universe
S. Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology

Mathematica Tensor Package

diffgeoManual.nb
diffgeo.m

Download and save diffgeo.m to your Mathematica Applications folder. Save diffgeoManual.nb somewhere convenient, double-clicking it will call up a mathematica tutorial notebook. If the links fail look here for the files.

The classic papers of GR have been made publicly available (for a short time) by the Physical Review.

Content:

1. Introduction and Motivation. This follows Chapter 8 of Carroll.
2. FRW Cosmology. FRW metric, co-movers, cosmological redshift, standard candles and distance measurements, Friedmann equation and expansion.
3. The Microwave Background. Decoupling, dipole anisotropy, the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, the Sachs-Wolfe effect, other sources of CMB anisotropy.
4. Baryosynthesis and the Early Universe. Fermi-Dirac and Bose distributions, effective number of species, neutrino masses, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, cold dark matter.
5. Inflation. Flatness, horizon, and monopole puzzles, slow-roll inflation, chaotic inflation.
6. CMB Anisotropies. Fluctuations and their evolution, vector and tensor modes, Boltzmann equations.
7. The Growth of Structure. linear perturbations after recombination, spectral functions, collapse of baryonic matter.
8. Inflation and Anisotropies in the CMB. Scalar and tensor fluctuations from inflation.
9. Special Topics. Vacuum energy density and the Standard Model, gravity via graviton exchange.

marking scheme: 70% + 30% take home exam

Assignments