Related papers: The Fine Structure Constant and the CMB Damping Sc…
Diffusion damping of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum results from imperfect photon-baryon coupling in the pre-recombination plasma. At redshift $5 \times 10^4 < z < 2 \times 10^6$, the plasma acquires an effective…
A time variation in the Higgs vacuum expectation value alters the electron mass and thereby changes the ionization history of the universe. This change produces a measurable imprint on the pattern of cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
Over the past decades, cosmology has become largely based on experimental data, the most important sources of which are studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). CMB is present in the Universe since the very first moments of its…
There are evidences that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) large-angle anomalies imply a departure from statistical isotropy and hence from the standard cosmological model. We propose a LCDM model extension whose dark energy component…
Recent data from the WMAP, ACT and SPT experiments provide precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature power spectrum over a wide range of angular scales. The combination of these observations is well fit by the…
These lecture notes form a primer on the theory of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy formation. With emphasis on conceptual aspects rather than technical issues, we examine the physical foundations of anisotropy evolution in…
We present a simple, yet accurate approximation for calculating the cosmic microwave background anisotropy power spectrum in adiabatic models. It consists of solving for the evolution of a two-fluid model until the epoch of recombination…
Cosmic microwave background anisotropies encode crucial information about the early Universe and fundamental cosmological physics. Although the standard $\Lambda$CDM model provides a successful description of cosmic evolution, persistent…
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…
There are indications from the study of quasar absorption spectra that the fine structure constant $\alpha$ may have been measurably smaller for redshifts $z>2.$ Analyses of other data ($^{149}$Sm fission rate for the Oklo natural reactor,…
The spectrum and statistics of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) are investigated under the hypothesis that scale invariance of the primordial density fluctuations should be promoted to full conformal invariance. As in the…
The CMB data recently released by BOOMERANG and MAXIMA suggest that the anisotropy spectrum has a third peak in the range 800<l_3<900. A combination of this result with constraints from large-scale structure permit us to differentiate…
The anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide our best laboratory for testing models of the formation and evolution of large-scale structure. The rich features in the cosmic microwave background anisotropy spectrum, in…
We study the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy in the scenario with late-decaying scalar condensations which arise in many class of cosmological scenarios based on supersymmetric models. With such a scalar condensation \phi, the…
The angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropy observed by WMAP has an anomalous dip at l~20 and bump at l~40. One explanation for this structure is the presence of features in the primordial curvature…
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…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and density fluctuations are calculated for flat cold dark matter (CDM) models with a wide range of parameters, i.e., $\Omega_0, h$ and $\Omega_B$ for both standard recombination and various…
Fluctuations in the cosmic neutrino background are known to produce a phase shift in the acoustic peaks of the cosmic microwave background. It is through the sensitivity to this effect that the recent CMB data has provided a robust…
We discuss present and future cosmological constraints on variations of the fine structure constant $\alpha$ induced by an early dark energy component having the simplest allowed (linear) coupling to electromagnetism. We find that current…
In the present work, we consider the cosmological constant model $\Lambda\propto\alpha^{-6}$, which is well motivated from three independent approaches. As is well known, the hint of varying fine structure constant $\alpha$ was found in…