Related papers: Decoupling and coherent plasma oscillations around…
The latest analysis of the cosmic microwave background by the Planck team finds more smoothing of the acoustic peaks in the temperature power spectrum than predicted by $\Lambda$CDM. Here we investigate whether this additional smoothing can…
We investigate an Early Coupled Quintessence model where a light scalar mediates a fifth force stronger than gravity among dark matter particles and leads to the growth of perturbations prior to matter-radiation equality. Using cosmological…
The fitting formula for the location of the first acoustic peak in the matter power spectrum is revised. We discuss the physics that leads to baryon acoustic oscillations: the recombination history, the tight coupling approximation and the…
Weakly interacting massive particles are part of the lepton-photon plasma in the early universe until kinetic decoupling, after which time the particles behave like a collisionless gas with nonzero temperature. The Boltzmann equation for…
Measurements of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) is one of the most promising methods for measuring the fundamental cosmological parameters. However, in order to infer parameters from precision measurements…
We investigate the consequences of a non-negligible baryon fraction for models of structure formation in Cold Dark Matter dominated cosmologies, emphasizing in particular the existence of oscillations in the present-day matter power…
Prior to recombination photons, electrons, and atomic nuclei rapidly scattered and behaved, almost, like a single tightly-coupled photon-baryon plasma. We investigate here the accuracy of the tight-coupling approximation commonly used to…
We fit the BOOMERANG, MAXIMA and COBE/DMR measurements of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy in spatially flat cosmological models where departures from standard recombination of the primeval plasma are parametrized through a change…
While, to ensure successful cosmology, dark matter (DM) must kinematically decouple from the standard model plasma very early in the history of the Universe, it can remain coupled to a bath of "dark radiation" until a relatively late epoch.…
The question of decoupling and freeze-out is reinvestigated and analysed in terms of transparent semi-classical decoupling formulae, which provide a smooth decoupling in time both, for single and two particle inclusive spectra. They…
Forthcoming CMB experiments will allow us to accurately investigate the power spectrum at very small scales ($\ell > 1000$). We predict the level of the primary anisotropies, given the actual CMB measurements. The secondary anisotropies…
A hypothetical dark energy component may have an equation of state that is different from a cosmological constant and possibly even changing in time. The spacing of the cosmic microwave background peaks is sensitive to the ratio of the…
We study the physical limitations placed on CMB temperature and polarization measurements of the initial power spectrum by geometric projection, acoustic physics, gravitational lensing and the joint fitting of cosmological parameters.…
The time development of the reduced density matrix for a quantum oscillator damped by coupling it to an ohmic environment is calculated via an identity of the Debye-Waller form. Results obtained some years ago by Hakim and the author in the…
We expose the scenarios of primordial baryon-photon plasma evolution within the framework of the Milne-like universe models. Recently, such models find a second wind and promise an inflation-free solution of a lot of cosmological puzzles…
We examine the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy for signatures of early quintessence dark energy -- a non-negligible quintessence energy density during the recombination and structure formation eras. In contrast to a…
In this paper, we study small-scale fluctuations (baryon pressure sound waves) in the baryon fluid during recombination. In particular, we look at their evolution in the presence of relative velocities between baryons and photons on large…
In some instances, e.g. near phase transitions, thermodynamic fluctuations become macroscopically relevant, and relative amplitudes grow far above the standard $N^{-1/2}$ scale, with $N$ the number of particles. Such large fluctuations are…
We present a detailed and self-contained analytical derivation of the evolution of sub-horizon cosmological perturbations before decoupling, based on previous work by S. Weinberg. These solutions are valid in the minimal LCDM scenario, to…
Semiconductor microcavities, in which strong coupling of excitons to confined photon modes leads to the formation of exciton-polariton modes, have increasingly become a focus for the study of spontaneous coherence, lasing, and condensation…