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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…
Recent observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) show some tension with a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. For one, the cosmological parameters determined by the CMB are at odds with the expansion…
We investigate how the properties of dark energy affect the cosmological measurements of neutrino mass and extra relativistic degrees of freedom. We limit ourselves to the most basic extensions of $\Lambda$ cold dark matter (CDM) model,…
We illustrate how recently improved low-redshift cosmological measurements can tighten constraints on neutrino properties. In particular we examine the impact of the assumed cosmological model on the constraints. We first consider the new…
We present a coherent, re-usable python framework which further builds on the cosmological emulator code CosmoPower. In the current era of high-precision cosmology, we require high-accuracy calculations of cosmological observables with…
Perturbations from inflation evolve into large scale structure of the late universe, and encode abundant cosmic structure formation physics. We allow freedom in the primordial power spectrum, rather than assuming a power law scale…
We consider a varieties of quintessence scalar field models in a homogeneous and isotropic geometry of the universe with zero spatial curvature aiming to provide stringent constraints using a series of cosmological data sets, namely, the…
In this Thesis I discuss several recent results obtained using the CMB spectra measured by Planck and several other cosmological probes. Extensions of the $\Lambda$CDM model are studied, including the presence of an additional sterile…
The search for primordial gravitational waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) will soon be limited by our ability to remove the lensing contamination to $B$-mode polarization. The often-used quadratic estimator for lensing is known…
We investigate the observational constraints on the cosmic neutrino background (CNB) given by the extended $\Lambda$CDM scenario ($\Lambda$CDM $+ N_{\rm eff} + \sum m_{\nu} + c^2_{\rm eff} + c^2_{\rm vis} + \xi_{\nu}$) using the latest…
We compute the Bayesian Evidence for models considered in the main analysis of Planck cosmic microwave background data. By utilising carefully-defined nearest-neighbour distances in parameter space, we reuse the Monte Carlo Markov Chains…
Because the baryon-to-photon ratio eta_{10} is in some doubt, we drop nucleosynthetic constraints on eta_{10} and fit the three cosmological parameters (h, Omega_M, eta_{10}) to four observational constraints: Hubble parameter h_o =…
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) is an invaluable probe of the conditions of the early universe. Recent measurements of its spatial anisotropy have allowed accurate determinations of several fundamental cosmological…
Detecting the extremely low-energy neutrinos that form the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) presents many experimental challenges, but pursuing this elusive goal is still worthwhile because these weakly-interacting particles could provide a…
We consider a cosmological model in which a fraction $f$ of the Dark Matter (DM) is allowed to decay in an invisible relativistic component, and compute the resulting constraints on both the decay width (or inverse lifetime) $\Gamma$ and…
We consider structure formation and CMB anisotropies in a closed universe, both with and without a cosmological constant. The CMB angular power spectrum and the matter transfer function are presented, along with a discussion of their…
We present the first results based on Planck measurements of the CMB temperature and lensing-potential power spectra. The Planck spectra at high multipoles are extremely well described by the standard spatially-flat six-parameter LCDM…
We revisit the constraint on the primordial helium mass fraction Yp from observations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) alone. By minimizing chi square of recent CMB experiments over 6 other cosmological parameters, we obtained rather…
In the near future, observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies will provide accurate determinations of many fundamental cosmological parameters. In this paper, we analyse degeneracies among cosmological parameters to…
We present a method for calculating large numbers of power spectra C_l and P(k) that accelerates CMBfast by a factor around 10^3 without appreciable loss of accuracy, then apply it to constrain 11 cosmological parameters from current Cosmic…