Related papers: BICEP2 and Keck Array operational overview and sta…

This work is point of the preparation to the analysis of the PLANCK satellite data. The PLANCK satellite is an ESA mission which has been launched the 14th of may 2009 and is dedicaced to the measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background…

The observational status of inflation after the Planck 2013 and 2015 results and the BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck joint analysis is discussed. These pedagogical lecture notes are intended to serve as a technical guide filling the gap…

We present new measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization from the final season of the Cosmic Anisotropy Polarization MAPper (CAPMAP). The data set was obtained in winter 2004-2005 with the 7 m antenna in Crawford…

South Pole Station offers a unique combination of high, dry, stable conditions and well-developed support facilities. Over the past 20 years, a sequence of increasingly sophisticated CMB experiments at Pole have built on the experience of…

The search for the B-mode polarization of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the new frontier of observational Cosmology. A B-mode detection would give an ultimate confirmation to the existence of a primordial Gravitational Wave (GW)…

The polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is encoded with exactly the same cosmic information as the CMB's temperature anistropy. However, polarization has the additional promise of accurately probing the reionization…

The BICEP2 collaboration reported recently a B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation inconsistent with the null hypothesis at a significance of > 5 {\sigma}. This result has been often interpreted as a…

The footprint of inflation in the polarization pattern of the CMB is expected at more than an order of magnitude below the limits of current polarization measurements. Large receiver arrays are mandatory for achieving the required…

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropies, as observed by independent astronomical missions such as WMAP, Planck, and most recently the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the South Pole Telescope have…

(Abridged) Despite the great success of precision cosmology, cosmologists cannot fully explain the initial conditions of the Universe. Inflation, an exponential expansion in the first 10^-36s, is a promising potential explanation. A generic…

For the simplest inflation models, the recent detection of a large primordial B-mode polarization signal by the BICEP2 experiment indicates a slight tension with the upper limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, from the Planck satellite.…

In addition to its potential to probe the Inflationary cosmological paradigm, millimeter-wave polarimetry is a powerful tool for studying the Milky Way galaxy's composition and magnetic field structure. Towards this end, presented here are…

Observations of the temperature anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) lend support to an inflationary origin of the universe, yet no direct evidence verifying inflation exists. Many current experiments are focussing on the…

The announcement by BICEP2 of the detection of B-mode polarization consistent with primordial gravitational waves with a tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r=0.2^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$, challenged predictions from most inflationary models of a lower value…

Precision measurements of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, especially experiments seeking to detect the odd-parity "B-modes", have far-reaching implications for cosmology. To detect the B-modes generated…

The BICEP/Keck series of experiments target the Cosmic Microwave Background at degree-scale resolution from the South Pole. Over the next few years, the "Stage-3" BICEP Array (BA) telescope will improve the program's frequency coverage and…

The B-mode detection of Cosmic Microwave Background polarization will require new technological developments, able to get sensitivities at least 2 orders of magnitude better than for the E-mode. This really ambitious goal cannot be reached…

Recently, BICEP2 measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) $B$-mode polarization at degree angular scales has indicated the presence of tensor modes with a high tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r=0.2$ when assuming nearly…

In this work we present an extension of the ROMA map-making code for data analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background polarization, with particular attention given to the inflationary polarization B-modes. The new algorithm takes into account a…

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,…