Related papers: Beyond the Standard cosmological model with CMB
The role of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarisation data in constraining the presence of primordial isocurvature modes is examined. While the MAP satellite mission will be unable to simultaneously constrain isocurvature modes and…
In recent years, there have been increasing challenges to the cosmological principle, based on new observations of e.g. supernovae and the cosmic bulk flow. As a result, the cosmological community is speaking their concern for the…
There has been significant recent progress in observational cosmology. This, in turn, has provided an unprecedented picture of the early universe and its evolution. In this review I will present a (biased) view of how one can use these…
Inflation is considered one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. However, the account of the origin of cosmic structure, as provided by the standard inflationary paradigm, is not fully satisfactory. The fundamental issue is the…
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…
We consider an alternative scenario of inflation which can account for a spatially open universe. It is similar to the old inflation in which the bubble nucleation occurs in the sea of false vacuum, but differs from it in that the second…
Accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies with an angular resolution of a few arcminutes can be used to determine fundamental cosmological parameters such as the densities of baryons, cold and hot dark…
We perform detailed calculations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in a CDM-dominated open universe with primordial adiabatic density perturbations for a variety of reionization histories. We show that to a great extent, the…
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenges-developing a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe and identifying the…
The two fundamental assumptions in cosmology are that the Universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic when averaged on large scales. Given the big implication of these assumptions, there has been a lot of statistical tests carried…
Gaussianity and statistical isotropy of the Universe are modern cosmology's minimal set of hypotheses. In this work we introduce a new statistical test to detect observational deviations from this minimal set. By defining the temperature…
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,…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
We examine all-sky cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps on large angular scales to compare their consistency with two scenarios: the standard inflationary quantum picture, and a distribution constrained to have a universal…
Besides expanding anisotropically, the universe can also be anisotropic at the level of its (spatial) curvature. In particular, models with anisotropic curvature and isotropic expansion leads both to a $\Lambda$CDM-like phenomenology and to…
We discuss possible distortions of the ionization history of the Universe in the model with small scale baryonic clouds. The corresponding scales of the clouds are much smaller than the typical galactic mass scales. These clouds are…
Both the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and Planck observations reported the hemispherical asymmetry of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuation. The hemispherical asymmetry might be stemmed from the…
We investigate whether non-adiabatic perturbations from inflation could produce an asymmetric distribution of temperature anisotropies on large angular scales in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We use a generalised non-linear $\delta…
Primordial statistical anisotropy is a key indicator to investigate early Universe models and has been probed by the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. In this paper, we examine tensor-mode CMB fluctuations generated from…
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…