The things I will discuss (as well as things proposed here as final projects for the course) are actually the cutting edge of theoretical cosmology. Therefore, you will hardly find some things presented during the lectures in books; I will however give references to original publications (anyway, it is better for you to switch from books to preprints if you want to be a scientist).


The books on the subject are:


  1. 1.V. Mukhanov, ``Physical foundations of cosmology'', Cambridge University Press, 2005. I personally recommend this one!

  2. 2. Andrew L. Liddle and David H. Lyth, ``Cosmological inflation and large-scale structure'', Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  3. 3.N.D. Birrell, P.C.W. Davies, ``Quantum fields in curved spacetime'', Cambridge University Press, 1982.


Also, here is the list of some relevant papers:


  1. 1.R. Brandenberger, ``Topics in cosmology,'' PoS P2GC, 007 (2006) [arXiv:hep-th/0701157]. Good introductionary review.

  2. 2.V.F. Mukhanov, H.A. Feldman and R.H. Brandenberger, ``Theory of cosmological perturbations. Part 1. Classical perturbations. Part 2. Quantum theory of perturbations. Part 3. Extensions,'' Phys. Rept. 215, 203 (1992). I believe we all learned perturbation theory in GR from this review. Ask me for a copy if you are unable to find it.

  3. 3. F. Bernardeau, S. Colombi, E. Gaztanaga and R. Scoccimarro, ``Large-scale structure of the universe and cosmological perturbation theory,'' Phys. Rept. 367, 1 (2002) [arXiv:astro-ph/0112551].

  4. 4. M. Crocce and R. Scoccimarro, ``Renormalized Cosmological Perturbation Theory,'' Phys. Rev. D 73, 063519 (2006) [arXiv:astro-ph/0509418]; M. Crocce and R. Scoccimarro, ``Memory of Initial Conditions in Gravitational Clustering,'' Phys. Rev. D 73, 063520 (2006) [arXiv:astro-ph/0509419]. These papers will be useful for those who will decide to try Crocce-Scoccimarro LSS diagrammatic technique as their final project.

  5. 5. P. McDonald, ``Dark matter clustering: a simple renormalization group approach,'' Phys. Rev. D 75, 043514 (2007) [arXiv:astro-ph/0606028]; S. Matarrese and M. Pietroni, ``Resumming Cosmic Perturbations,'' JCAP 0706, 026 (2007) [arXiv:astro-ph/0703563]; T. Matsubara, ``Resumming Cosmological Perturbations via the Lagrangian Picture: One-loop Results in Real Space and in Redshift Space,'' arXiv:0711.2521 [astro-ph].

  6. 6. J. Stewart and M. Walker, Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. A 341, 49 (1974).

  7. 7. M. B. Hoffman and M. S. Turner, Phys. Rev. D 64, 023506 (2001), [arXiv: astro-ph/0006321]; W. H. Kinney, ``Inflation: Flow, fixed points and observables to arbitrary order in slow roll,'' Phys. Rev. D 66, 083508 (2002) [arXiv:astro-ph/0206032]; A. R. Liddle, ``On the inflationary flow equations,'' Phys. Rev. D 68, 103504 (2003) [arXiv:astro-ph/0307286]; P. Adshead and R. Easther, ``Constraining Inflation,'' arXiv:0802.3898 [astro-ph].

  8. 8. M. Spradlin, A. Strominger and A. Volovich, ``Les Houches lectures on de Sitter space'', arXiv:hep-th/0110007. In this paper, you will find a nice discussion of QFT in de Sitter space.

  9. 9. C.T. Byrnes, K. Koyama, M. Sasaki and D. Wands, JCAP 0711, 027 (2007) [arXiv:0705.4096 [hep-th]].