Cosmology and Astro-particle Physics

At the beginning of the 21-st century, fundamental physics and its essential part, cosmology, are confronted with major challenges reminiscent of those encountered a century earlier: two of its foundations, General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory, need to be reconciled. Cosmology, and particularly, physics of the CMB, are the fields in which the implications of modern fundamental physics could leave important observable traces, providing unique opportunities to understand the initial condition of the life circle in the Universe.

The reason for this is that the CMB radiation arose together with the birth of the Universe and encodes a wealth of information about the creation and evolution of the Universe (see here).

The reason for this is that the CMB radiation arose together with the birth of the Universe and encodes a wealth of information about the creation and evolution of the Universe (see here).

Image Courtesy of NASA WMAP

During the last five years the cosmology changed dramatically its status due to new and modern observations. More then 60 experiments in the CMB anisotropy and polarization area, including the recent WMAP experiment (see here ), were successfully carried through and presented a new observational picture of the Big Bang theory: discovery of the "dark energy" , confirmation of the "dark matter" existence and the flatness of space, verification of a scale invariant primordial perturbation spectrum, and an independent measure of the baryonic content of the Universe.

However, one of the most impressive result of the WMAP mission is related with discovery of  non-Gaussianity of the observational cosmic anisotropy signal.

The issue of non-Gaussianity play a crucial role in the analysis of the physical properties of the matter at the epoch of inflation and provide a unique opportunity to detect the fundamental properties of space such as non-trivial topology and global asymmetry of the Universe, widely discussed now in the literature.