Related papers: Evidence for extra radiation? Profile likelihood v…
The study of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) lensing potential has established itself by now as a robust way of probing the physics of large-scale structure growth. The most common estimators of the lensing potential are derived under…
We present calculations showing that upcoming Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments will have the power to improve on current constraints on neutrino masses and provide new limits on neutrino degeneracy parameters. The latter could…
The constraints on departures from general relativity (GR) at cosmological length scales due to cosmic microwave background (CMB) data are discussed. The departure from GR is measured by the ratio, parameterized as $1 +\varpi_0 (1 +…
The existence of a cosmic neutrino background has been inferred indirectly from cosmological surveys through its effect on the linear-theory evolution of primordial density perturbations, as well as from measurements of the primordial…
We forecast constraints on cosmological parameters with primary CMB anisotropy information and weak lensing reconstruction with a future post-Planck CMB experiment, the Cosmic Origins Explorer (COrE), using oscillation data on the neutrino…
Parity violating physics beyond the standard model of particle physics induces a rotation of the linear polarization of photons. This effect, also known as cosmological birefringence (CB), can be tested with the observations of the cosmic…
We use a high-accuracy computational code to investigate the precision with which cosmological parameters could be reconstructed by future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, in particular the two satellite missions MAP and…
We introduce a statistical measure of the effective model complexity, called the Bayesian complexity. We demonstrate that the Bayesian complexity can be used to assess how many effective parameters a set of data can support and that it is a…
One of the major goals of future Cosmic Microwave Background measurements is the accurate determination of the effective number of neutrinos $N_{\rm eff}$. Reaching an experimental sensitivity of $\Delta N_{\rm eff} = 0.013$ could indeed…
Recent analyses that include cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy measurements from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the South Pole Telescope have hinted at the presence of a dark radiation component at more than two standard…
It has been claimed recently that massive sterile neutrinos could bring about a new concordance between observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe, and local measurements of the…
Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) contain information which has been pivotal in establishing the current cosmological model. These data can also be used to test well-motivated additions to this model, such as cosmic…
To efficiently probe primordial non-Gaussianity using Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data, we require theoretical predictions that are factorizable, \textit{i.e.}\ those whose kinematic dependence can be separated. This property does not…
We study a possibility of constraining isotropic cosmic birefringence with help of cosmic microwave background polarisation data in the presence of polarisation angle miscalibration without relying on any assumptions about the Galactic…
A typical Bayesian inference on the values of some parameters of interest $\bf q$ from some data $D$ involves running a Markov Chain (MC) to sample from the posterior $p({\bf q},{\bf n} | D) \propto \mathcal{L}(D | {\bf q},{\bf n}) p({\bf…
We have estimated the CMB variance from the three-year WMAP data, finding a value which is significantly lower than the one expected from Gaussian simulations using the WMAP best-fit cosmological model, at a significance level of 98.7 per…
We extend a general maximum likelihood foreground estimation for cosmic microwave background polarization data to include estimation of instrumental systematic effects. We focus on two particular effects: frequency band measurement…
We consider the effects of new light species on the Cosmic Microwave Background. In the massless limit, these effects can be parameterized in terms of a single number, the relativistic degrees of freedom. We perform a thorough survey of…
We propose an efficient Bayesian MCMC algorithm for estimating cosmological parameters from CMB data without use of likelihood approximations. It builds on a previously developed Gibbs sampling framework that allows for exploration of the…
Present cosmological data are well explained assuming purely adiabatic perturbations, but an admixture of isocurvature perturbations is also permitted. We use a Bayesian framework to compare the performance of cosmological models including…