Here I share the resources from my Physics of the Dark Universe course taught by Gordan Krnjaic (GOAT’d). I think this was the first time this course was taught and it was also his first time teaching. Both went really well: the first couple weeks was virtual but the in person lectures were great because he was so engaging.
He spent the first 15 minutes of each lecture motivating the day’s topic and reviewing the previous lecture. This was great because it allowed anybody to ask clarifying questions we hadn’t thought of yet. With a hard course like this, you needed to review topics frequently to make sure you understood the topics. However with that, the class was very difficult conceptually. I felt like I could follow along, understand, and even ask questions about the topics in lecture, but each problem was basically asking students to analyze a completely new Universe. Looking back though, it was pretty cool and fun.
The class covered the following topics:
This class was really a mesh of particle physics, general relativity, thermodynamics, and cosmology. We went through the entire history of the Universe to finally reach how we’re currently trying to detect Dark Matter. Like Gordan said in first lecture, this class prepared me to go to the ArXiv and be able to understand most of an astrophysics or high energy physics paper. The main textbooks referenced in the class were a lecture notes from Daniel Baumann, Barbara Ryden, and Tongyan Lin.
This was one of my favorite astrophysics I took at UChicago. I felt out of my depth partially because the prerequisites included Statistical & Thermal Physics, which I would take the following school year, but he reviewed most of what was needed.
Here are my lecture notes: