Related papers: Large-angle anomalies in the CMB
The origin of power asymmetry and other measures of statistical anisotropy on the largest scales of the universe, as manifested in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and large-scale structure data, is a long-standing open question in…
The advent of high signal-to-noise cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy experiments has allowed detailed studies on the power spectrum of temperature fluctuations. The existence of acoustic oscillations in the anisotropy power…
Much recent work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has focussed on the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies and particularly on the recovery of cosmological parameters from acoustic peaks in the power spectrum. However,…
In this lecture, after a synthetic review of measurements of CMB temperature anisotropies and of their cosmological implications, the theoretical background of CMB polarization is summarized and the concepts of the main experiments that are…
Several accurate analyses have revealed a statistically significant North-South ecliptic asymmetry in the large-angle correlations strength of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation temperature field data from the Wilkinson…
We study the effect of global topology of the spatial geometry on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for closed flat and closed hyperbolic models in which the spatial hypersurface is multiply connected. If the CMB temperature…
Several accurate analyses of the CMB temperature maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have revealed a set of anomalous results, at large angular scales, that appears inconsistent with the statistical isotropy expected…
It is well known that processes of first order phase transitions may have occurred in the inflationary era. If one or more occurred well before the end of inflation, the nucleated bubbles are stretched to large scales and the primordial…
The low quadrupole of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), measured by COBE and confirmed by WMAP, has generated much discussion recently. We point out that the well-known correlation between temperature and polarization anisotropies of…
At the largest angular scales the presence of a number of unexpected features has been confirmed by the latest measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Among them are the anomalous alignment of the quadrupole and octopole with…
We investigate large-angle scale temperature anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data and model the large-angle anomalies as the effect of the CMB quadrupole anisotropies…
We test anisotropic dark energy models with the 7-year WMAP temperature observations data. In the presence of imperfect sources, due to large-scale gradients or anisotropies in the dark energy field, the CMB sky will be distorted…
We discuss how an extended foreground of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can account for the anomalies in the low multipoles of the CMB anisotropies. The distortion needed to account for the anomalies is consistent with a cold spot…
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…
We study the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in cold and mixed dark matter (CDM and MDM) models, with non scale-invariant primordial power spectra (i.e. $n \neq 1$) and a late, sudden reionization of the intergalactic…
In this short review, the predictions of inflation are presented and compared to the most recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy. It is argued that inflation is compatible with these observations but that…
Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
Since the very first observations, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) has revealed on large-scales unexpected features known as anomalies, which challenge the standard $\Lambda$ cold dark matter ($\Lambda$CDM) cosmological model. One…
We propose that several of the anomalies that have been observed at large angular scales in the CMB have a common origin in a cosmic bounce that took place before the inflationary era. The bounce introduces a new physical scale in the…