Related papers: A Hydrodynamical Approach to CMB mu-distortions
The tremendous experimental progress in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy studies over the last few years has helped establish a standard paradigm for cosmology at intermediate epochs and has…
Spectral distortions (SDs) of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide a powerful tool for studying particle physics. Here we compute the distortion signals from decaying particles that convert directly into photons at different epochs…
The formation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) provides a very powerful probe of the early universe at the epoch of recombination. Specifically, it is possible to constrain the variation of fundamental physical constants…
This review describes the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 and its impact on cosmology in the 50 years that followed. This discovery has established the Big Bang model of the Universe and the analysis of its…
The damping of a non-uniform magnetic field between the redshifts of about $10^4$ and $10^6$ injects energy into the photon-baryon plasma and causes the CMB to deviate from a perfect blackbody spectrum, producing a so-called…
After numerous astronomical and experimental searches, the precise particle nature of dark matter is still unknown. The standard Weakly Interacting Massive Particle(WIMP) dark matter, despite successfully explaining the large-scale features…
The primordial gravitational wave background (GWB) offers an exciting future avenue of discovery for new physics. Its information content encodes multiple eras in the early Universe's history, corresponding to many orders of magnitude in…
In this paper we study the effect of a magnetic field on the fluctuation spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. We find that upcoming measurements might give interesting bounds on large scale magnetic fields in the early Universe. If…
In addition to its spectrum and temperature anisotropy, the 2.7K Cosmic Microwave Background is also expected to exhibit a low level of polarization. The spatial power spectrum of the polarization can provide details about the formation of…
We have investigated the role of the cyclotron emission associated to cosmic magnetic fields on the evolution of CMB spectral distortions by considering the contributions by spontaneous and stimulated emission and by absorption in the…
We summarize the physical mechanism by which the Cosmic Microwave Background acquires a small degree of polarization. We discuss the imprint left by gravitational waves and the use of polarization as a test of the inflationary paradigm. We…
We intend to show how fundamental science is drawn from the patterns in the temperature and polarization fields of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and thus to motivate the field of CMB research. We discuss the field's…
A milestone of modern cosmology was the prediction and serendipitous discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over after decoupling from matter in the early evolutionary stages of the Universe. A prediction of…
Anisotropies in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background have been detected on a range of scales by several different experiments. These anisotropies reflect the primordial spectrum of metric perturbations in the early universe.…
Early energy injection to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from dissipation of acoustic waves generates deviations from the blackbody spectrum not only at second-order but also at third-order in cosmological perturbations. We compute…
We analyze cosmic microwave background (CMB) data taking into account the effects of a momentum dependent effective sound speed (MESS). This approach allows to study the effects of primordial entropy in a model independent way, and its…
We determine the full C_l spectra and correlation functions of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the CMB, generated by a source modeled by the large N limit of spontaneously broken global O(N)-theories. We point out a problem…
We investigate a statistical anisotropy on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) bispectrum, which can be generated from the primordial non-Gaussianity induced by quantum fluctuations of a vector field. We find new configurations in the…
Circular polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be induced by Faraday conversion of the primordial linearly polarized radiation as it propagates through a birefringent medium. Recent work has shown that the dominant…
With polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now detected, and confirmed by several independent experiments, the next goal is to characterise accurately its statistical properties. In these lecture notes we review the physical…