Related papers: Pre-recombinational energy release and narrow feat…
The Hubble tension, reflecting a persistent discrepancy between early- and late-time determinations of the Hubble constant, continues to motivate extensions of the standard cosmological model The Hubble tension motivates extensions of the…
The HeII->HeI recombination of primordial helium plasma (z = 1500 - 3000) is considered in terms of the standard cosmological model. This process affects the formation of cosmic microwave background anisotropy and spectral distortions. We…
Spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide stringent constraints on energy and entropy production in the post-BBN (Big Bang Nucleosynthesis) era. This has been used to constrain dark photon models with COBE/FIRAS…
We examine cosmic microwave background constraints on variations in the recombination history of the universe. We use a very general extension to the standard model of recombination characterized by two parameters, a and b, which multiply…
We study the possibility of explaining the recent EDGES detection by an energy injection in the pre-recombination era. Our aim is to show that the residue of this energy injection could give the resultant increase in the energy density at…
The advent of precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies has motivated correspondingly precise calculations of the cosmic recombination history. Cosmic recombination proceeds far out of equilibrium because of…
We show that the cumulative CO emission from galaxies throughout cosmic history distorts the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at a level that is well above the detection limit of future instruments, such as the Primordial…
Hydrogen atoms in the Universe that initially formed at redshift z = 1100 were reionized at 5 < z < 60. It is likely that this transition proceeded through a mixed phase of partial ionization. We develop an analytic approach to calculating…
High energy neutrinos and anti-neutrinos ($\gtrsim$ 100 GeV) can inject energetic electromagnetic particles into the baryon-photon plasma in the high redshift universe through electroweak showers from electroweak bremsstrahlung, inelastic…
In the early Universe, energy stored in small-scale density perturbations is quickly dissipated by Silk-damping, a process that inevitably generates mu- and y-type spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These…
Following the pioneering observations with COBE in the early 1990s, studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have focused on temperature and polarization anisotropies. CMB spectral distortions - tiny departures of the CMB energy…
The thermodynamic and dynamical properties of a variable dark energy model with density scaling as rho_x \propto (1+z)^m, z being the redshift, are discussed following the outline of Jetzer et al. This kind of models are proven to lead to…
Within the framework of a flat cosmological model a propagation of an instantaneous burst of isotropic radiation is considered from the moment of its beginning at some initial redshift z0 to the moment of its registration now (at z=0). We…
We use cosmological simulations of reionization to predict the effect of large HII regions around individual high-redshift quasars on the possible signal from the redshifted 21cm line of neutral hydrogen in the pre-reionization era. We show…
Interest in non-standard recombination scenarios has been spurred by recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) results from BOOMERANG and MAXIMA, which show an unexpectedly low second acoustic peak, resulting in a best-fit baryon density…
We have developed an improved recombination calculation of H, HeI, and HeII in the early Universe which involves a line-by-line treatment of each atomic level. We find two major differences compared with previous calculations. Firstly, the…
The cosmological recombination radiation (CRR) is one of the inevitable $\Lambda$CDM spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). While it shows a rich spectral structure across dm-mm wavelengths, it is also one of the…
A milestone of modern cosmology was the prediction and serendipitous discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over after decoupling from matter in the early evolutionary stages of the Universe. A prediction of…
We derive constraints on the injection of free-streaming dark radiation after big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) by considering the decay of a massive hidden sector particle into dark radiation. Such a scenario has the potential to alleviate…
The fine tuning of parameters required to reproduce our present day Universe suggests that our Universe may simply be a region within an eternally inflating super-region. Many other regions beyond our observable Universe would exist with…