........ published in NEWSLETTER # 64
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........ published in NEWSLETTER # 64
GENERATION OF COSMOLOGICAL LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE
by Professor D.N. Schramm, The University of Chicago, Chicago/IL (U.S.A.)
The NATO ASI on the "Generation of Cosmological Large-Scale Structure", held in November 1996, at the Ettore Majorana Centre in Erice, Italy, was the third school in the particle-astrophysics series that Schramm, Galeotti and Berezinsky have organized at Erice. The first school in the series, on "Gauge Theory and the Early Universe, was held in May 1986, and the second, on "Dark Matter in the Universe", was held in May 1988. The first two were successful NATO Advanced Study Institutes of which the proceedings have been published. Similarly, the proceedings of the 1996 school have been published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in the NATO book series (NATO ASI SERIES C503).
The choice of the topic for the third school was natural since the problem of generating the large-scale structure has become the most pressing problem in cosmology today. In particular, it is this generation of structure that is the interface between astronomical observations and particle models for the early universe. All models to date for generating structure inevitably require new fundamental physics beyond the current standard model of high energy physics. In particular, the seeds for generating structure usually invoke the physics of the unification of forces, and the matter needed to clump and form the structures seems to require particle properties that have not been seen in laboratories to date. New astronomical observations seem to be finding ever larger structures, while the observations of the microwave background anisotropies by the COBE satellite and by balloon and ground-based experiments are tightly constraining scenarios.
Reference books: C348, C441, C503