New Views of Cosmology and the Microworld

Abstract

The past few years have seen several breakthroughs in particle astrophysics and cosmology. In several cases, new observations can only be explained with the introduction of new fundamental physics. In this talk I summarize some of these recent advances and describe several areas where progress may well be made in the future. More specifically, I focus on supersymmetric and axion dark matter, self-interacting dark matter, cosmic-microwave-background and large-scale-structure tests of inflation, and the dark-energy problem.

Invited talk at Secrets of the B meson, XXX SLAC Summer Institute, August 2002 (SSI02), 37 pages, 13 figures. Also to appear in proceedings of ICHEP02, 31st International Conference on High Energy Physics, Amsterdam, July 2002