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Effective Field Theories In Cosmology, Riccardo Penco

Physics - Dissertations

During the last 20 years, a large amount of detailed cosmological observations have promoted cosmology to the rank of high-precision science. Remarkably, all the observations currently available can be accounted for by assuming that (i) the universe is approximately homogeneous and isotropic on large scales, (ii) gravitational interactions are described by General Relativity with a non-vanishing cosmological constant and (ii) 85% of the matter content of the universe is in the form of dark matter, a presently unknown type of matter which interacts with ordinary matter only gravitationally. Current theoretical efforts are focused on …