Related papers: Can inhomogeneities solve the horizon problem ?
Gravitational lensing of the microwave background by the intervening dark matter mainly arises from large-angle fluctuations in the projected gravitational potential and hence offers a unique opportunity to study the physics of the dark…
The observed dipole asymmetry in Cosmic Microwave Background radiation may have originated from the modulations of super-horizon long wavelength modes. In this work we unveil different aspects of asymmetries generated from the long…
Quantum fluctuations during inflation may be responsible for temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Observations of CMB anisotropies can be used to falsify many currently popular models. In this paper we discuss…
The spectrum and statistics of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) are investigated under the hypothesis that scale invariance of the primordial density fluctuations should be promoted to full conformal invariance. As in the…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…
We generalize the treatment of inflationary perturbations to deal with the non-Markovian colored noise emerging from any realistic approach to stochastic inflation. We provide a calculation of the power-spectrum of the gauge-invariant…
The horizon problem in the standard model of cosmology (LDCM) arises from the observed uniformity of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has the same temperature everywhere (except for tiny, stochastic fluctuations), even in…
Gravitational lensing, caused by matter perturbations along the line-of-sight to the last scattering surface, can modify the shape of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy power spectrum. We discuss the detectability of lensing…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which permeates the entire Universe, is the radiation left over from just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. On very large scales, the CMB radiation field is smooth and isotropic, but the existence of…
We review the basic hypotheses which motivate the statistical framework used to analyze the cosmic microwave background, and how that framework can be enlarged as we relax those hypotheses. In particular, we try to separate as much as…
We review the recently found large-scale anomalies in the maps of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. These include alignments of the largest modes of CMB anisotropy with each other and with geometry and direction…
The COBE detection of microwave anisotropies provides the best way of fixing the amplitude of cosmological fluctuations on the largest scales. We discuss the impact of this new, precise normalization and give fitting formulae for the…
A detailed search has been made for evidence of foreground contributions to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) WMAP, such foregrounds being related to our Galaxy. We find remarkable results. On the largest angular scales we find…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a precious window on fundamental physics at very high energy scales, possibly including quantum gravity, GUTs and supersymmetry. The CMB has already enabled defect-based rivals to inflation to…
Inflationary cosmology predicts that the particle horizon should be generically much bigger than the present-day Hubble radius, $1/H_0$. This implies a special regime of super-Hubble scale energy density fluctuations imprinted on the cosmic…
Inflation produces super-horizon sized perturbations that ultimately return within the horizon and are thought to form the seeds of all observed large scale structure in the Universe. But inflationary predictions can only be compared with…
We discuss selected large-scale anomalies in the maps of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Specfically, these include alignments of the largest modes of CMB anisotropy with one another and with the geometry and…
We evaluate the expected level of foreground contamination to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarised radiation, focusing on the diffuse emission from our own Galaxy. In particular, we perform a first attempt to simulate an all sky…
The clustering of galaxies is well characterized by fractal properties, with the presence of an eventual cross-over to homogeneity still a matter of considerable debate. In this letter we discuss the cosmological implications of a fractal…
The standard analysis of the CMB data assumes that the distance to the last scattering surface can be calculated using the distance-redshift relation as in the Friedmann model. However, in the inhomogeneous universe, even if <\delta\rho>…