An introduction to modern theories for the origin of structure in the Universe is given. After a brief review of the growth of cosmological perturbations in an expanding Universe and a summary of some important observational results, the lectures focus on the inflationary Universe scenario and on topological defect models of structure formation. A summary of the theory and current observational...

We present an analysis of the cosmological evolution of matter sources with small anisotropic pressures. This includes electric and magnetic fields, collisionless relativistic particles, gravitons, antisymmetric axion fields in low-energy string cosmologies, spatial curvature anisotropies, and stresses arising from simple topological defects. We calculate their evolution during the radiation an...

1 Abstract. Fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background CMB are observed by the WMAP. When expanded into the harmonic eigenmodes of the space part of a cosmological model, they provide insight into the large-scale topology of space. All harmonic polynomials on the multiply connected dodecahedral Poincaré space are constructed. Strong and specific selection rules are given by comparing the p...

In order to create such a standard, we focus on developing a single-electron turnstile based on two mesoscopic normal metal (N) – insulator (I) – superconductor (S) tunnel junctions [2]. Even though the trade-off between missed tunneling and higher-order tunneling processes limits the current of a single device to around 10 30 pA [3], the device is simple enough to be parallelized, and high eno...

Submitted for the MAR06 Meeting of The American Physical Society Conductance Behavior of Molecularly Linked Gold Nanoparticle Films Near the Metal-Insulator Transition JEFFREY DUNFORD, YOSHINORI SUGANUMA, AL-AMIN DHIRANI, BRYAN STATT, University of Toronto — Self-assembled molecularly-linked metal nanoparticle films exhibit interesting electronic behavior that can range from insulating to metal...

We investigate strong gravitational lensing in the concordance ΛCDM cosmology by carrying out ray-tracing along past light cones through the Millennium Simulation, the largest simulation of cosmic structure formation ever carried out. We extend previous ray-tracing methods in order to take full advantage of the large volume and the excellent spatial and mass resolution of the simulation. As a f...