Cosmological Perturbation Theory and Structure Formation

Abstract

These lecture notes discuss several topics in the physics of cosmic structure formation starting from the evolution of small-amplitude fluctuations in the radiation-dominated era. The topics include relativistic cosmological perturbation theory with the scalar-vector-tensor decomposition, the evolution of adiabatic and isentropic initial fluctuations, microwave background anisotropy, spatial and angular power spectra, the cold dark matter linear transfer function, Press-Schechter theory, and a brief introduction to numerical simulation methods.