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During the 1980s, it was frequently claimed that spatial patterns of archaeological and contemporary settlements were closely related to the social nature of the societies which had created and modelled them (Hietala 1984; Hillier & Hanson 1984). Despite a decade of alternative claims, such theories are still widely accepted although in many cases the emphasis has shifted from economic factors to symbolic or social ones. The presence of a class-based social system is one of the major characteristics of Iranian society during the Sasanian era (224-651 CE). This social system was based upon the official religion of Sasanians - Zoroastrianism - and had a major impact on most aspects of Iranian society during this period. The far-reaching impact of this social system on architectural space and urban infrastructure is clearly representative of a class-based society. The collapse of the Sasanian world, accelerated by Arab invasions (641 CE), severely reduced the dominance of Zoroastrianism within Iran, heralding a fundamental change in the social life of its people. These changes, accompanied by the acceptance of a new religion, have been the focus of several researchers over the last decades (Kennedy 2001). In contrast to Sasanian society, Early Islamic social structure was characterised as one of equality and its urban forms as ones with little differentiation as typified by Medina (Zarrinkub 1993). The aim of this dissertation is to test the above assumptions and models with reference to a single urban site - the city of Barn. Selected due to its Pre-Islamic and Islamic occupations, its excellent state of preservation allows a full testing of the above assumptions through archaeological analysis. The results of this research indicate a continuation of patterns of Sasanian space and society into the Islamic period. In addition, the space and society of Bam, documented in this research, provides an important step towards a further understanding of the social and spatial organisation of Sasanian and Early-Islamic cities, as well as providing a foundation for additional research in this field. / Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Iran

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第24869号 / 理博第4979号 / 新制||理||1711(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科物理学・宇宙物理学専攻 / (主査)教授 向山 信治, 准教授 樽家 篤史, 教授 橋本 幸士 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

A cosmological polytope of an undirected connected graph is a lattice polytope which when the graph is interpreted as a feynman diagram can be used to calculate the contribution of that feynman diagram to the wavefunction of some cosmological models. This contribution can be calculated using the canonical form of the cosmological polytope, which can be computed by taking the sum of the canonical forms of the facets of a subdivision of the cosmological polytope. Juhnke-Kubitzke, Solus and Venturello showed that the cosmological polytope of any undirected connected graph has a regular unimodular triangulation. They characterized the facets of such triangulations for trees and cycles to yield combinatorial formula for the desired canonical forms. Here we characterize the facets of such a triangulation of the cosmological polytope of the complete bipartite graph K_{2,n} and use that characterization to calculate the normalized volume. / Ett kosmologiskt polytop av en oriktad sammanhängande graf är ett gitterpolytop, vilket när grafen tolkas som ett feynman diagram kan användas för att beräkna bidraget av feynman diagrammet till vågfunktionen av vissa kosmologiska modeller. Detta bidrag can beräknas genom att använda den kanoniska formen av det kosmologiska polytopet, som kan beräknas genom att ta summan av de kanoniska formerna av facetterna av en uppdelning av det kosmologiska polytopet. Juhnke-Kubitzke, Solus och Venturello visade att det kosmologiska polytopet av en oriktad sammanhängande graf har en reguljär unimodulär triangulering. De karaktäriserar facetterna av sådana trianguleringar av träd och cykliska grafer, vilket ger en kombinatorisk formel för de kanoniska formerna av intresse. Här karaktäriserar vi facetterna av en sådan trianguleraing för det kosmologiska polytopet av den kompletta bipartita grafen K_{2,n} och använder denna karaktärisering för att beräkna den normaliserade volymen.

Ever since they were formulated in the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas' famous Five Ways to demonstrate the existence of God have been frequently debated. During this process there have been several misconceptions of what Aquinas actually meant, especially when discussing his cosmological arguments. While previous researchers have managed to tease out why Aquinas accepts some infinite regresses and rejects others, I attempt to add on to this by demonstrating the centrality of his metaphysics in his argument from motion. Aquinas cannot be properly understood or debated with a contemporary view of causality, but rather must wrestle with the concepts he actually employs in the arguments. To demonstrate this, I will compare the Thomistic argument from motion to the contemporary Kalām cosmological argument of William Lane Craig. Although some may consider it beneficial to base theistic arguments on more modern principles, this analysis shows that the metaphysical framework used by Aquinas is much less vulnerable to the rebuttals that otherwise challenge the Kalām argument, and that their differences in strength rest on their differences in metaphysics.

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One of the primary targets of current and especially future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, an important thermal relic are cosmic neutrinos, while many interesting extensions of the Standard Model predict new light particles which are even more weakly coupled to ordinary matter and therefore hard to detect in terrestrial experiments. On the other hand, these elusive particles may be produced efficiently in the early universe and their gravitational influence could be detectable in cosmological observables. In this thesis, we describe how measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale structure (LSS) of the universe can shed new light on the properties of neutrinos and on the possible existence of other light relics. These cosmological observations are remarkably sensitive to the amount of radiation in the early universe, partly because free-streaming species such as neutrinos imprint a small phase shift in the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) which we study in detail in the CMB and LSS power spectra. Building on this analytic understanding, we provide further evidence for the cosmic neutrino background by independently confirming its free-streaming nature in different, currently available datasets. In particular, we propose and establish a new analysis of the BAO spectrum beyond its use as a standard ruler, resulting in the first measurement of this imprint of neutrinos in the clustering of galaxies. Future cosmological surveys, such as the next generation of CMB experiments (CMB-S4), have the potential to measure the energy density of relativistic species at the sub-percent level and will therefore be capable of probing physics beyond the Standard Model. We demonstrate how this improvement in sensitivity can indeed be achieved and present an observational target which would allow the detection of any extra light particle that has ever been in thermal equilibrium. Interestingly, even the absence of a detection would result in new insights by providing constraints on the couplings to the Standard Model. As an example, we show that existing bounds on additional scalar particles, such as axions, may be surpassed by orders of magnitude.

Master of Science / Department of Physics / Bharat Ratra / In this report, we discuss the four standard energy conditions of General Relativity (null, weak, dominant, and strong) and investigate their cosmological consequences. We note that these energy conditions can be compatible with cosmic acceleration provided that a repulsive cosmological constant exists and the acceleration stays within certain bounds. Scalar fields and dark energy, and their relationships to the energy conditions, are also discussed. Special attention is paid to the 1988 Ratra-Peebles scalar field model, which is notable in that it provides a physical self-consistent framework for the phenomenology of dark energy. Appendix B, which is part of joint-research with Anatoly Pavlov, Khaled Saaidi, and Bharat Ratra, reports on the existence of the Ratra-Peebles scalar field tracker solution in a curvature-dominated universe, and discusses the problem of investigating the evolution of long-wavelength inhomogeneities in this solution while taking into account the gravitational back-reaction (in the linear perturbative approximation).