Explanations of the cosmic microwave background prompt this unique case study of theory building in modern science.

In the last fifteen years, various areas of high energy physics, astrophysics and theoretical physics have converged on the study of cosmology so that any graduate student in these disciplines today needs a reasonably self-contained introduction to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This book presents the essential theoretical tools necessary to acquire a modern working knowledge of CMB physics. The style of the book, falling somewhere between a monograph and a set of lecture notes, is pedagogical and the author uses the typical approach of theoretical physics to explain the main problems in detail, touching on the main assumptions and derivations of a fascinating subject. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Why CMB Physics? (297 KB). Contents: Why CMB Physics?; From CMB to the Standard Cosmological Model; Problems with the SCM; SCM and Beyond; Essentials of Inflationary Dynamics; Inhomogeneities in FRW Models; The First Lap in CMB Anisotropies; Improved Fluid Description of Pre-Decoupling Physics; Kinetic Hierarchies; Early Initial Conditions?; Surfing on the Gauges; Interacting Fluids; Spectator Fields; Appendices: The Concept of Distance in Cosmology; Kinetic Description of Hot Plasmas; Scalar Modes of the Geometry; Metric Fluctuations: Gauge Independent Treatment. Readership: PhD students and researchers in physics, astrophysics and astronomy.

Spectacular observational breakthroughs, particularly by the WMAP satellite, have led to a new epoch of CMB science long after its original discovery. Taking a physical approach, the authors of this volume probe the problem of the 'darkness' of the Universe: the origin and evolution of dark energy and matter in the cosmos. Starting with the observational background of modern cosmology, they provide an accessible review of this fascinating yet complex subject. Topics discussed include the kinetics of the electromagnetic radiation in the Universe, the ionization history of cosmic plamas, the origin of primordial perturbations in light of the inflation paradigm, and the formation of anisotropy and polarization of the CMB. This fascinating review will be valuable to advanced students and researchers in cosmology.

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over from the Big Bang, is arguably the most important topic in modern cosmology. Its theory and observation have revolutionized cosmology from an order-of-magnitude science to a precision science. This graduate textbook describes CMB physics from first principles in a detailed yet pedagogical way, assuming only that the reader has a working knowledge of General Relativity. Among the changes in this second edition are new chapters on non-Gaussianities in the CMB and on large-scale structure, and extended discussions on lensing and baryon acoustic oscillations, topics that have developed significantly in the last decade. Discussions of CMB experiments have been updated from WMAP data to the new Planck data. The CMB success story in estimating cosmological parameters is then treated in detail, conveying the beauty of the interplay of theoretical understanding and precise experimental measurements.

Rhodri Evans tells the story of what we know about the universe, from Jacobus Kapteyn’s Island universe at the turn of the 20th Century, and the discovery by Hubble that the nebulae were external to our own galaxy, through Gamow’s early work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and its subsequent discovery by Penzias and Wilson, to modern day satellite-lead CMB research. Research results from the ground-based experiments DASI, BOOMERANG, and satellite missions COBE, WMAP and Planck are explained and interpreted to show how our current picture of the universe was arrived at, and the author looks at the future of CMB research and what we still need to learn. This account is enlivened by Dr Rhodri Evans' personal connections to the characters and places in the story.

Nominated as an outstanding thesis by Professor Robert Crittenden of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in Portsmouth, and winner of the Michael Penston Prize for 2014 given by the Royal Astronomical Society for the best doctoral thesis in Astronomy or Astrophysics, this work aims to shed light on one of the most important probes of the early Universe: the bispectrum of the cosmic microwave background. The CMB bispectrum is a potential window on exciting new physics, as it is sensitive to the non-Gaussian features in the primordial fluctuations, the same fluctuations that evolved into today’s planets, stars and galaxies. However, this invaluable information is potentially screened, as not all of the observed non-Gaussianity is of primordial origin. Indeed, a bispectrum arises even for perfectly Gaussian initial conditions due to non-linear dynamics, such as CMB photons scattering off free electrons and propagating in an inhomogeneous Universe. Dr. Pettinari introduces the reader to this intrinsic bispectrum in a pedagogic way, building up from the standard model of cosmology and from cosmological perturbation theory, the tool cosmologists use to unravel the history of the cosmos. In doing so, he introduces SONG, a new and efficient code for solving the second-order Einstein and Boltzmann equations. Next, he moves on to answer the crucial question: is the intrinsic bispectrum going to screen the primordial signal in the CMB? Using SONG, he computes the intrinsic bispectrum and shows how its contamination leads to a small bias in the estimates of primordial non-Gaussianity, a great news for the prospect of using CMB data to probe primordial non-Gaussianity.

The series of texts composing this book is based on the lectures presented during the II José Plínio Baptista School of Cosmology, held in Pedra Azul (Espírito Santo, Brazil) between 9 and 14 March 2014. This II JBPCosmo has been entirely devoted to the problem of understanding theoretical and observational aspects of Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB).The CMB is one of the most important phenomena in Physics and a fundamental probe of our Universe when it was only 400,000 years old. It is an extraordinary laboratory where we can learn from particle physics to cosmology; its discovery in 1965 has been a landmark event in the history of physics.The observations of the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation through the satellites COBE, WMAP and Planck provided a huge amount of data which are being analyzed in order to discover important informations regarding the composition of our universe and the process of structure formation.