Abstract
Modern cosmology was born after the advent of General Relativity in 1915. The Standard Model of cosmology is the current theory for the description of the Universe. It is based on the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity, which together provide the best available description of all the known forces in Nature. The inflationary paradigm is another important ingredient. The Standard Model of cosmology turns out to be very successful in explaining a large number of observational data, among which the most remarkable are Hubble’s law, the primordial abundance of light elements, and the cosmic microwave background. However, there are also several open problems: the mechanism responsible for the matter-antimatter asymmetry, the origin of dark matter, and the observed accelerated expansion rate of the Universe. These issues are currently among the strongest motivations to look for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity.
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Notes
- 1.
In this textbook, we use the so-called natural units in which \(c = \hbar = k_B = 1\), unless stated otherwise. For more details, see Appendix A.
- 2.
The parsec is a common astronomical unit of length and its symbol is pc. 1 pc = \(3.086\cdot 10^{16}\) m. 1 kpc = \(10^3\) pc, 1 Mpc = \(10^6\) pc, etc.
- 3.
An important exception is the spectrum of the primordial density perturbations, which were generated before the BBN, presumably during the period of inflation.
- 4.
A similar, though less accurate, observation was done by Ter-Shamonov, who was calibrating the antenna prototype of the Russian radio telescope RATAN-600.
- 5.
\(M_\odot \approx 2 \cdot 10^{33}\) g is the Solar mass, which is quite commonly used as a unit of mass in astronomy.
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Bambi, C., Dolgov, A.D. (2016). Introduction. In: Introduction to Particle Cosmology. UNITEXT for Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48078-6_1
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