Related papers: A Cosmic Microwave Background feature consistent w…
Quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field in the early Universe, amplified by inflation, produce a primordial gravitational-wave background across a broad frequency band. We derive constraints on the spectrum of this gravitational…
Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to…
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) is the radiation left over from the hot Big Bang. Its blackbody spectrum and small anisotropy provide clues about the origin and early evolution of the Universe. In particular, the spectrum…
The statistics of black holes and their masses strongly suggests that their mass distribution has a cutoff towards lower masses near $3 \times 10^{6}$ M$_{\odot}$. This is consistent with a classical formation mechanism from the…
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a unique opportunity for a direct study of the primordial cosmic plasma at redshift z ~1000. The angular power spectra of temperature and polarisation fluctuations are…
Gravitational waves (GWs) have a great potential to probe cosmology. We review early universe sources that can lead to cosmological backgrounds of GWs. We begin by presenting definitions of GWs in flat space-time and in a cosmological…
We investigate the observable consequences of creating cosmic texture by breaking a global SU(3) symmetry, rather than the SU(2) case which is generally studied. To this end, we study the nonlinear sigma model for a totally broken SU(3)…
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 treatments of large scale anomalies in the microwave sky are a posteriori, with unquantified look-elsewhere effects. We contrast these with physical models of specific inhomogeneities in the early universe which then generate apparent…
Current theories of particle physics lead to the unavoidable conclusion that there must have been several phase transitions in the early universe. Further, in the context of these theories, it is possible that cosmological phase transitions…
Precision measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and of the clustering of large-scale structure have supposedly confirmed that the primordial density perturbation has a (nearly) scale-invariant spectrum. However…
It has been recently argued that higher dimensional gravity theories may manifest themselves not only at short microscopic distances but also at large cosmological scales. We study the constraints that cosmic microwave background…
We explore the large angular scale temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background due to expanding homogeneous local voids at redshift z~1. A compensated spherically symmetric homogeneous dust-filled void with radius \~3*10^2…
In the near future, observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies will provide accurate determinations of many fundamental cosmological parameters. In this paper, we analyse degeneracies among cosmological parameters to…
The information theory approach is suggested to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) problem for negatively curved homogeneous and isotropic Universe. Namely, the Kolmogorov complexity of anisotropy of spots in CMB sky maps is proposed as…
If the Universe has the topology of a 3-torus ($T^3$), then it follows from recent data on large-scale temperature fluctuations $\Delta T/T$ of the cosmic microwave background that either the minimal size of the torus is at least of the…
New calculations of the Galactic contamination over microwave background radiation anisotropies are carried out. On one hand, when a frequency-dependent contrast of molecular clouds with respect to the Galactic background of the diffuse…
The Cosmic Defect theory has been confronted with four observational constraints: primordial nuclear species abundances emerging from the big bang nucleosynthesis; large scale structure formation in the universe; cosmic microwave background…
Canada has thriving communities in CMB (cosmic microwave background) studies, cosmology and submillimetre (submm) astronomy, with involvement in many facilities that featured prominently in previous Astronomy Long Range Plans. The standard…
Large-scale cosmic microwave background anisotropies in homogeneous, globally anisotropic cosmologies are investigated. We perform a statistical analysis in which the four-year data from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite is searched…