Structure Formation in the Universe

'Padmanabhan has written an invaluable exposition from first physical principles of almost all the things that a new graduate student embarking upon research in theoretical cosmology needs to know … A unique feature, for a book at this level, is the extensive collection of advanced problems at the end of each chapter … Overall, I found Padmanabhan's book to be an extremely useful working text that covers most of the topics at the research frontier.' Prof. John Barrow, The Times Higher Education Supplement

• Preface; Part I. The Smooth Universe: 1. Introducing the Universe; 2. The Friedmann model; 3. Thermal history of the Universe; Part II. The Clumpy Universe: 4. Growth of linear perturbations; 5. Statistical properties of the density fluctuations; 6. The microwave background radiation; 7. The linear theory: velocity fields; 8. The non-linear evolution; 9. The non-linear theory: high redshift objects; Part III. Towards a More Complete Picture: 10. The origin of initial perturbations; 11. Dark matter; 12. Epilogue; Appendices; Notes and references; Index.