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We constrain the expansion history of the Universe and the cosmological matter density fraction in a model-independent way by exclusively making use of the relationship between background and perturbations under a minimal set of…
Gravitational lensing information from the two and higher point statistics of the CMB temperature and polarization fields are intrinsically correlated because they are lensed by the same realization of structure between last scattering and…
Recently, self-annihilation of dark matter particles is proposed to explain the "WMAP Haze" and excess of energetic positrons and electrons in ATIC and PAMELA results. If self-annihilation of dark matter occurs around the recombination of…
We place new constraints on sources of ionizing and resonance radiation at the epoch of the recombination process using the recent CMB temperature and polarization spectra coming from WMAP. We find that non-standard recombination scenarios…
I highlight the remarkable advances in the past few years in CMB research on total primary anisotropies, in determining the power spectrum, deriving cosmological parameters from it, and more generally lending credence to the basic…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations effectively measure the basic properties of the universe during the recombination epoch. CMB measurements fix the distance to the surface of last scatter, the sound horizon of the…
With the recent measurement of full sky cosmic microwave background polarization from WMAP, key cosmological degeneracies have been broken, allowing tighter constraints to be placed on cosmological parameters inferred assuming a standard…
The anomalous lack of large angle temperature correlations has been a surprising feature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) since first observed by COBE-DMR and subsequently confirmed and strengthened by the Wilkinson Microwave…
The notion that dust might have formed the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been strongly refuted on the strength of four decades of observation and analysis, in favour of recombination at a redshift z ~ 1080. But tension with the data…
Amongst standard model parameters that are constrained by cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations, the optical depth $\tau$ stands out as a nuisance parameter. While $\tau$ provides some crude limits on reionization, it also degrades…
The coming flood of CMB polarization experiments, spurred by the recent detection of CMB polarization by DASI and WMAP, will be confronted by many new analysis tasks specific to polarization. For the analysis of CMB polarization data sets,…
The search for alternative cosmological models is largely motivated by the growing discordance between the predictions of LCDM and the ever improving observations, such as the disparity in the value of H_0 measured at low and high…
Weighted mean and median statistics techniques are used to combine 23 independent lower redshift, $z<1.04$, Hubble parameter, $H(z)$, measurements and determine binned forms of $H(z)$. When these are combined with 5 higher redshift,…
Driven by the CMB temperature-redshift ($T$-$z$) relation as demanded by deconfining SU(2) Yang-Mills thermodynamics, an according cosmological model is proposed and analysed. This model -- SU(2)$_\CMB$ -- exhibits a dark sector,…
Varying fundamental constants (VFC) [e.g., the fine-structure constant, $\alpha_{\rm EM}$] can arise in numerous extended cosmologies. Through their effect on the decoupling of baryons and photons during last scattering and reionisation,…
We present the new recombination code HYREC-2, holding the same accuracy as the state-of-the-art codes HYREC and COSMOREC and, at the same time, surpassing the computational speed of the code RECFAST commonly used for CMB-anisotropy data…
Cosmic microwave background polarization encodes information not only on the early universe but also dark energy, neutrino mass, and gravity in the late universe through CMB lensing. Ground based surveys such as ACTpol, PolarBear, SPTpol…
Primordial magnetic fields (PMFs) may explain observations of magnetic fields on extragalactic scales. They are most cleanly constrained by measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) anisotropies. Their effects on cosmic…
We propose a new reionization probe that uses cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations; the cross-correlation between fluctuations in the CMB optical depth which probes the integrated electron density, $\delta\tau$, and the Compton…
The scalar mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background is derived in a spatially closed universe from the Boltzmann equation using the line of sight integral method. The EE and TE multipole coefficients have been extracted…