Cosmology

This volume invites the reader to tackle the big questions of the universe from cultural aspects of cosmology and its influence on arts, philosophy, and politics to more specialized technical advances in the field as the physics of dark sector, black holes, galaxies, large structure formation, and particles. In fact, it reveals our endless searching for the better understanding of the universe as a legacy of knowledge for next generations.

This book introduces the basic concepts of particle cosmology and covers all the main aspects of the Big Bang Model (expansion of the Universe, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, Cosmic Microwave Background, large scale structures) and the search for new physics (inflation, baryogenesis, dark matter, dark energy). It also includes the majority of recent discoveries, such as the precise determination of cosmological parameters using experiments like WMAP and Planck, the discovery of the Higgs boson at LHC, the non-discovery to date of supersymmetric particles, and the search for the imprint of gravitational waves on the CMB polarization by Planck and BICEP.