The Cosmological Constant

This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant. Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its magnitude, and the physics of a small (and potentially nonzero) vacuum energy.Comment: 50 pages. Submitted to Living Reviews in Relativity (http://www.livingreviews.org/), December 199

The development of milliKelvin Si bolometers for future X-ray array devices

Silicon bolometers are currently under development for milliKelvin operation; these devices are being produced using Si wafer fabrication technology. The design and performance of individual bolometers, using doped layers with a thickness in the range 0.2 to 2 μm are described. The use of epitaxial growth to replace ion implantation for improved performance is discussed. For future use in space based X-ray astronomy, such devices could be fabricated as complete one or two dimensional arrays with integrated isolation and support. The proposed fabrication method for such arrays is outlined

Parity Violating Statistical Anisotropy

Particle production of an Abelian vector boson field with an axial coupling is investigated. The conditions for the generation of scale invariant spectra for the vector field transverse components are obtained. If the vector field contributes to the curvature perturbation in the Universe, scale-invariant particle production enables it to give rise to statistical anisotropy in the spectrum and bispectrum of cosmological perturbations. The axial coupling allows particle production to be parity violating, which in turn can generate parity violating signatures in the bispectrum. The conditions for parity violation are derived and the observational signatures are obtained in the context of the vector curvaton paradigm. Two concrete examples are presented based on realistic particle theory