Related papers: Cosmic Microwave Background Statistics for a Direc…
It is commonly assumed that the stochastic background of gravitational waves on cosmological scales follows an almost scale-independent power spectrum, as generically predicted by the inflationary paradigm. However, it is not inconceivable…
Most inflationary models predict primordial perturbations to be statistically isotropic and homogeneous. Cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations, however, indicate a possible departure from statistical isotropy in the form of a…
Recent observations suggest that there are violations of the isotropy of the universe at large scales, an important part of the cosmological principle. In this paper, we use the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data to search for spatial…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments generally infer a temperature fluctuation from a measured intensity fluctuation through the first term in the Taylor expansion of the Planck function, the relation between the intensity in a…
We implement and investigate a method for measuring departures from scale-invariance, both scale-dependent as well as scale-free, in the primordial power spectrum of density perturbations using cosmic microwave background (CMB) C_l data and…
Distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background energy spectrum of the $\mu$ type are sensitive to the primordial power spectrum through the dissipation of curvature perturbations on scales $k\simeq 50$ - $10^4\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$. Their…
We consider Cosmic Microwave Background constraints on inflation models for which the primordial power spectrum is a mixture of perturbations generated by inflaton fluctuations and fluctuations in a curvaton field. If future experiments do…
We study the statistics of the primordial power spectrum in models where massless gauge vectors are coupled to the inflaton, paying special attention to observational implications of having fundamental or effective horizons embedded in a…
Accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies with an angular resolution of a few arcminutes can be used to determine fundamental cosmological parameters such as the densities of baryons, cold and hot dark…
Various data analyses of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provide observational hints of statistical isotropy breaking. Some of these features can be studied within the framework of primordial vector fields in inflationary theories…
We investigate the potential of observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure in the Universe to detect possible modifications of standard inflationary models by physics beyond the Planck…
We study the statistical properties of spherical harmonic modes of temperature maps of the cosmic microwave background. Unlike other studies, which focus mainly on properties of the amplitudes of these modes, we look instead at their…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy power on the largest angular scales observed both by WMAP and COBE DMR appears to be lower than the one predicted by the standard model of cosmology with almost scale free primordial…
We study several anisotropic inflationary models and their implications for the observed violation of statistical isotropy in the CMBR data. In two of these models the anisotropy decays very quickly during the inflationary phase of…
We study features in the bispectrum of the primordial curvature perturbation correlated with the reconstructed primordial power spectrum from the observed cosmic microwave background temperature data. We first show how the bispectrum can be…
Anisotropies in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background have been detected on a range of scales by several different experiments. These anisotropies reflect the primordial spectrum of metric perturbations in the early universe.…
In inflation cosmologies, cosmic structure develops through the gravitational instability of the inevitable quantum noise in primordial scalar fields. I show how the acceleration of the universe defines the shape of the primordial spectrum…
This lecture is a sketch of the physics of the cosmic microwave background. The observed anisotropy can be divided into four main contributions: variations in the temperature and gravitational potential of the primordial plasma, Doppler…
Gaussianity and statistical isotropy of the Universe are modern cosmology's minimal set of hypotheses. In this work we introduce a new statistical test to detect observational deviations from this minimal set. By defining the temperature…
In this thesis we investigate several aspects related to the theory of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We develop a new algorithm to calculate the angular power spectrum of the anisotropies which is two orders of magnitude…