Advanced topics in GR.
Intended for graduate students on the level of the course NTMF037. Lectures are delivered in English.
The lectures take place on Tuesdays at 16:30 in the lecture hall T1 (big lecture hall close to the main entrance to Troja building).
Students should choose two topics covered in the course for the examination.
Please contact O. Svítek <ota@matfyz.cz> for more information and/or your selection of topics at the end of semester.
Equations of motion in the post-Newtonian expansion. Equations of motion in the mass-ratio (post-geodesic) expansion. Phasing in gravitational-wave inspirals and the post-adiabatic iteration. Decay of an eccentric binary at leading PN order (Peters-Mathews formulas). Kerr geodesics and their integration. Adiabatic decay of “constants of motion” in Kerr (Mino formulas). The question of spins and non-integrability.
I will start with a discussion of the hurdles of General Relativity (GR) to address the dark energy problem, and I will then introduce the basics of extending Einstein’s theory in cosmology. I will explain how the introduction of new degrees of freedom beyond GR can offer new perspectives for the dark energy problem, and will discuss their phenomenological implications for cosmology and astrophysics.
We investigate aspects of classical and quantum cosmology. In particular, we
(i) discuss the open topic of how to define temperature and surface gravity in dynamical spacetimes;
(ii) derive the mode decomposition and Wightman two-point function for FLRW spacetimes; and
(ii) investigate the thermal behaviour of an Unruh-DeWitt particle detector in asymptotically-de Sitter spacetimes.
By demanding the gravitational action to yield a well posed variational problem, one needs to add the so called York-Gibbons-Hawking term. We shall derive this term and study some of its applications to black hole thermodynamics and beyond.
© 2021-10-01 Pavel Krtouš <Pavel.Krtous@utf.mff.cuni.cz>