Related papers: Band-power reconstruction of the primordial fluctu…
The angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies is a good probe to look into the primordial density fluctuations at large scales in the universe. Here we re-examine the angular power spectrum of…
We perform a cosmological analysis in which we allow the primordial power spectrum of scalar perturbations to assume a shape that is different with respect to the usual power-law, arising from the simplest models of cosmological inflation.…
Gravitational lensing distorts the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and imprints a characteristic pattern onto it. The distortions depend on the projected matter density between today and redshift $z \sim 1100$. In this paper…
We discuss a method for a model independent reconstruction of the CMB temperature fluctuation power spectrum on small and intermediate scales that is geared to individual experiments. The importance of off-diagonal correlations for…
We introduce a simple yet powerful {\it analytic} method which obtains the structure of cosmic microwave background anisotropies to better than 5-10\% in temperature fluctuations on {\it all} scales. It is applicable to {\it any} model in…
Statistical isotropy is often assumed in cosmology and should be tested rigorously against observational data. We construct simple quadratic estimators to reconstruct asymmetry in the primordial power spectrum from CMB temperature and…
We explore the potential of the B-mode anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) to constrain the shape of the primordial tensor power spectrum in a model-independent way. We expand possible perturbations to the…
In this thesis we investigate several aspects related to the theory of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We develop a new algorithm to calculate the angular power spectrum of the anisotropies which is two orders of magnitude…
A novel methodology for analysing the relation between the energy density in gravitational waves and primordial power spectra is developed. Focusing on scalar-induced gravitational radiation, this methodology is applied to a number of…
The primary results of most observations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy are estimates of the angular power spectrum averaged through some broad band, called band-powers. These estimates are in turn what are used to produce…
Reconstructions of the primordial power spectrum (PPS) of curvature perturbations from cosmic microwave background anisotropies and large-scale structure data suggest that the usually assumed power-law PPS has localised features (up to…
We consider a class of inflationary models with small oscillations imprinted on an otherwise smooth inflaton potential. These oscillations are manifest as oscillations in the power spectrum of primordial perturbations, which then give rise…
We develop a pseudo power spectrum technique for measuring the lensing power spectrum from weak lensing surveys in both the full sky and flat sky limits. The power spectrum approaches have a number of advantages over the traditional…
We provide a simple but robust bound on the primordial curvature perturbation in the range $10^4 {\rm Mpc}^{-1} < k < 10^5 {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, which has not been constrained so far unlike low wavenumber modes. Perturbations on these scales…
We present full sky microwave maps in five bands (23 to 94 GHz) from the WMAP first year sky survey. Calibration errors are <0.5% and the low systematic error level is well specified. The 2<l<900 anisotropy power spectrum is cosmic variance…
A linear modulation of the primordial perturbations is proposed as an explanation for the observed asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data. A cut sky, reduced…
The statistical properties of a map of the primary fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) may be specified to high accuracy by a few thousand power spectra measurements, provided the fluctuations are gaussian, yet the number…
We allow a more general (step-function) form of the primordial power spectrum than the usual featureless power-law Harrison--Zeldovich (with spectral index n=1) power spectrum, and fit it to the latest Cosmic Microwave Background data sets.…
We investigate the ability to constrain oscillatory features in the primordial power spectrum using current and future cosmic microwave background observations. In particular, we study the observability of an oscillation arising from…
We derive the primordial power spectrum of density fluctuations in the framework of quantum cosmology. For this purpose we perform a Born-Oppenheimer approximation to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for an inflationary universe with a scalar…