The Early Universe

The Early Universe has become the standard reference on forefront topics in cosmology, particularly to the early history of the Universe. Subjects covered include primordial nubleosynthesis, baryogenesis, phases transitions, inflation, dark matter, and galaxy formation, relics such as axions, neutrinos and monopoles, and speculations about the Universe at the Planck time. The book includes more than ninety figures as well as a five-page update discussing recent developments such as the COBE results.

The Physics of the Early Universe is an edited and expanded version of the lectures given at a recent summer school of the same name. Its aim is to present an advanced multi-authored textbook that meets the needs of both postgraduate students and young researchers interested in, or already working on, problems in cosmology and general relativity, with emphasis on the early universe. A particularly strong feature of the present work is the constructive-critical approach to the present mainstream theories, the careful assessment of some alternative approaches, and the overall balance between theoretical and observational considerations. As such, this book will also benefit experienced scientists and nonspecialists from related areas of research.

University Physics is a three-volume collection that meets the scope and sequence requirements for two- and three-semester calculus-based physics courses. Volume 1 covers mechanics, sound, oscillations, and waves. Volume 2 covers thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, and Volume 3 covers optics and modern physics. This textbook emphasizes connections between between theory and application, making physics concepts interesting and accessible to students while maintaining the mathematical rigor inherent in the subject. Frequent, strong examples focus on how to approach a problem, how to work with the equations, and how to check and generalize the result. The text and images in this textbook are grayscale.

This book is written from the viewpoint that a deep connection exists between cosmology and particle physics. It presents the results and ideas on both the homogeneous and isotropic Universe at the hot stage of its evolution and in later stages. The main chapters describe in a systematic and pedagogical way established facts and concepts on the early and the present Universe. The comprehensive treatment, hence, serves as a modern introduction to this rapidly developing field of science. To help in reading the chapters without having to constantly consult other texts, essential materials from General Relativity and the theory of elementary particles are collected in the appendices. Various hypotheses dealing with unsolved problems of cosmology, and often alternative to each other, are discussed at a more advanced level. These concern dark matter, dark energy, matter–antimatter asymmetry, etc. Particle physics and cosmology underwent rapid development between the first and the second editions of this book. In the second edition, many chapters and sections have been revised, and numerical values of particle physics and cosmological parameters have been updated.

The Early Universe has become the standard reference on forefront topics in cosmology, particularly to the early history of the Universe. Subjects covered include primordial nubleosynthesis, baryogenesis, phases transitions, inflation, dark matter, and galaxy formation, relics such as axions, neutrinos and monopoles, and speculations about the Universe at the Planck time. The book includes more than ninety figures as well as a five-page update discussing recent developments such as the COBE results.

Connections developed in recent years between particle physics and cosmologyare the focus of attention in this new textbook. The author describes some of the theories which have been developed to describe the fundamental interaction of elementary particles in the extremely high temperatures of the early universe, taking care to distinguish facts and well-established results from hypotheses and speculations. - The three parts of the book discuss the standard hot big bang model of the earlyuniverse, the basic ideas of the standard and the grand unified theories of elementary particles, and the influence of dark matter on the large-scale evolution of structure. In addition to making some minorcorrections the author has added an appendix presenting new results and an updated bibliography. Two main groups of readers are addressed: research students in astronomy can use this book to understand the impact of elementary particle theory on cosmology, while research students in particle physics can use it to acquaint themselves with the basic facts of cosmology. The book is written carefully enough to appeal also to a wider audience of physicists.

This work investigates gravitational wave production in the early universe and identifies potentially observable features, thereby paving the way for future gravitational wave experiments. It focuses on gravitational wave production in two scenarios: inflation in a model inspired by loop quantum gravity, and preheating at the end of inflation. In the first part, it is demonstrated that gravitational waves’ spectrum differs from the result obtained using ordinary general relativity, with potentially observable consequences that could yield insights into quantum gravity. In the second part, it is shown that the cosmic gravitational wave background is anisotropic at a level that could be detected by future experiments. Gravitational waves promise to be an rich source of information on the early universe. To them, the universe has been transparent from its earliest moments, so they can give us an unobstructed view of the Big Bang and a means to probe the fundamental laws of nature at very high energies.

A new look at the first few seconds after the Big Bang—and how research into these moments continues to revolutionize our understanding of our universe Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history. Delving into the remarkable science of cosmology, Dan Hooper describes many of the extraordinary and perplexing questions that scientists are asking about the origin and nature of our world. Hooper examines how we are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang and test promising theories for how and why our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. We may be poised to finally discover how dark matter was formed during our universe’s first moments, and, with new telescopes, we are also lifting the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it. Wrestling with the mysteries surrounding the initial moments that followed the Big Bang, At the Edge of Time presents an accessible investigation of our universe and its origin.