Related papers: Planck and reionization history: a model selection…
Planck has produced detailed all-sky observations over nine frequency bands between 30 and 857 GHz. These observations allow robust reconstruction of the primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations over nearly the…
The recent discovery of a high optical depth tau to Thomson scattering from the WMAP data implies that significant reionization took place at redshifts z~15. This discovery has important implications for the sources of reionization, and…
The dust produced by the first generation of stars will be a foreground to cosmic microwave background. In order to evaluate the effect of this early dust, we calculate the power spectrum of the dust emission anisotropies and compare it…
The Planck experiment will soon provide a very accurate measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies. This will let cosmologists determine most of the cosmological parameters with unprecedented accuracy. Future experiments will…
We present detailed predictions for the redshifted 21cm signal from the epoch of reionization. These predictions are obtained from radiative transfer calculations on the results of large scale (100/h Mpc), high dynamic range, cosmological…
We apply our symmetry based Power tensor technique to test conformity of PLANCK Polarization maps with statistical isotropy. On a wide range of angular scales (l=40-150), our preliminary analysis detects many statistically anisotropic…
We investigate the implications for inflation of the detection of B-modes polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by BICEP2. We show that the hypothesis of primordial origin of the measurement is only favored by the first four…
In-flight measurement of the antenna main beams of the Planck instruments is a crucial input to the data analysis pipeline. We study the main beam reconstruction achievable through external planets using a flight simulator to model their…
We compare cosmological parameters from different Planck sky maps and likelihood pipelines, assessing robustness of cosmological results with respect to the choice of the latest Planck maps-likelihood combination. We show that, for the…
The precision of recent experiments such as ${\it Planck}$ have allowed us to constrain standard and non-standard physics (e.g., due to dark matter annihilation or varying fundamental constants) during the recombination epoch. However, we…
The Planck mission will permit measurements of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background and of polarized foregrounds such as our own Galaxy with an unprecedented combination of accuracy and completeness. This will provide…
The timescape cosmology represents a potentially viable alternative to the standard homogeneous cosmology, without the need for dark energy. Although average cosmic evolution in the timescape scenario only differs substantially from that of…
We apply Bayesian statistics to perform model selection on different reionisation scenarios via the Multinest algorithm. Initially, we recover the results shown by 21CMMC for the parameter estimation of 21cmFAST models. We proceed to test…
This paper describes the mapmaking procedure applied to Planck LFI (Low Frequency Instrument) data. The mapmaking step takes as input the calibrated timelines and pointing information. The main products are sky maps of $I,Q$, and $U$ Stokes…
The precise form of the foregrounds for sky-averaged measurements of the 21-cm line during and before the epoch of reionization is unknown. We suggest that the level of complexity in the foreground models used to fit global 21-cm data…
The recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies provided by the Planck satellite experiment have significantly improved the constraints on several cosmological parameters. In this brief paper we point out a small but…
We show that under certain circumstances the differences between the absorption mean and Planck mean opacities can lead to multiple solutions for an LTE atmospheric structure. Since the absorption and Planck mean opacities are not expected…
We compare the results from several sets of cosmological simulations of cosmic reionization, produced under Cosmic Reionization On Computers (CROC) project, with existing observational data on the high-redshift Ly-alpha forest and the…
We analyze simulated maps of the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) experiment and recover a nearly cosmic-variance limited estimate of the reionization optical depth $\tau$. We use a power spectrum-based likelihood to…
We consider cosmological models with a power spectrum of perturbations featuring an enhanced amplitude on dwarf galaxy scales (with a "bump" or a "tilt"). Early formation of a large number of galaxies in such models, compared to the…