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General lectures
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This page contains several short lectures intended for physicists who are not specialists in either cosmology or field theory, though most of them do assume at least a basic graduate-level education in the subjects listed among its ‘prerequisites.’ They are presented at a pedagogical level, so it is hoped that you might be able to learn something useful or interesting from them.
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[pdf]
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Free-body diagrams,
This is a short lecture intended to introduce undergraduate students to a simple prescription for applying Newton's laws using free-body diagrams.
Karlstad University, pedagogical lecture, October 18, 2010.
Prerequisites: High-school physics
[Format: A5 paper]
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[pdf]
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Dark matter as a heavy particle,
This talk explains how to estimate the interaction strength of a heavy particle if it is to provide an explanation for the correct amount of the dark matter in the universe today.
Niels Bohr International Academy, Tea-talk, October 2, 2009.
Prerequisites: Quantum field theory and general relativity
[Format: A5 paper]
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[pdf]
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Inflation and the primordial perturbations,
This lecture reviews how inflation produces the slight spatial variations in an otherwise perfectly featureless universe. These primordial pertubations, over time and through the influence of gravity, grow into the structures that we observe in the universe today.
Niels Bohr Institute, Guest lecture, February 6, 2009.
Prerequisites: General relativity and a little quantum field theory
[Format: A5 paper]
[a US letter sized version is available here]
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[—]
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Too much of a good thing—the trans-Planckian problem of inflation,
A brief introduction to how the very ingredients of inflation—the quantum fluctuations of a field in an expanding space-time—might lead to its own undoing.
Niels Bohr International Academy, Tea-talk, October 17, 2008.
Prerequisites: Quantum field theory and general relativity
[Format: A5 paper]
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[pdf]
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The universe in six or seven numbers,
A summary of the cosmological model assumed by the WMAP experiment,
together with the bounds it places on the parameters of this model with
its five-year data.
Niels Bohr International Academy, Tea-talk, May 29, 2008.
Prerequisites: General relativity
[Format: A5 paper]
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[pdf]
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Scalar fields without a scale,
A derivation of the propagator for a scale-invariant scalar field
theory—or a scalar “unparticle”—starting from
three simple assumptions.
Niels Bohr International Academy, Tea-talk, December 17, 2007 and
Theoretical Physics Journal Club, June 11, 2008.
Prerequisites: Quantum field theory
[Format: A5 paper]
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[pdf]
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The Nucleus,
An introductory lecture on the nucleus for undergraduates.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November, 2006.
Prerequisites: Quantum mechanics
[Format: half-monarch paper]
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