Related papers: Reionization history and CMB parameter estimation
The Planck satellite is expected to improve the measurement of most cosmological parameters by several factors with respect to current WMAP results. The actual performance may depend upon various aspects of the data analysis. In this paper…
We prepare real-life Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) lensing extraction with the forthcoming Planck satellite data, by studying two systematic effects related to the foregrounds contamination: the impact of foreground residuals after a…
We present cosmological constraints from the combination of the full mission 9-year WMAP release and small-scale temperature data from the pre-Planck ACT and SPT generation of instruments. This is an update of the analysis presented in…
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…
I review recent constraints on and claimed detections of a time-varying fine-structure constant $\alpha$, and discuss our own work, particularly on the effects of $\alpha$ in the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure. Our…
We examine cosmic microwave background constraints on variations in the recombination history of the universe. We use a very general extension to the standard model of recombination characterized by two parameters, a and b, which multiply…
Robust modeling of non-linear scales is critical for accurate cosmological inference in Stage IV surveys. For weak lensing analyses in particular, a key challenge arises from the incomplete understanding of how non-gravitational processes,…
The first-year WMAP data release showed that the reionization optical depth to CMB photons is greater than previously thought. This follows from unexpectedly high values of the C^TE_l spectrum, for l up to ~30, presumably allowing a…
We study the constraints on reionization from five years of WMAP data, parametrizing the evolution of the average fraction of ionized hydrogen with principal components that provide a complete basis for describing the effects of…
We study contributions from inhomogeneous (patchy) reionization to arcminute scale ($1000 < \ell < 10,000$) cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. We show that inhomogeneities in the ionization fraction, rather than in the mean…
Cosmic reionization and dark matter decay can impact observations of the cosmic microwave sky in a similar way. A simultaneous study of both effects is required to constrain unstable dark matter from cosmic microwave background…
We study the reionization histories where ionizing UV photons are emitted from decaying particles, in addition to usual contributions from stars and quasars, taking account of the fact that the universe is not fully ionized until z = 6 as…
The residuals of the power spectra of WMAP and Planck's cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies data are known to exhibit a few interesting anomalies at different scales with marginal statistical significance. Combining bottom-up and…
We use the new cosmological recombination code, CosmoRec, for parameter estimation in the context of (future) precise measurements of the CMB temperature and polarization anisotropies. We address the question of how previously neglected…
We study reionization in two non-flat $\Lambda$CDM inflation models that best fit the Planck 2015 cosmic microwave background anisotropy observations, ignoring or in conjunction with baryon acoustic oscillation distance measurements. We…
One of the main challenges facing upcoming CMB experiments will be to distinguish the cosmological signal from foreground contamination. We present a comprehensive treatment of this problem and study how foregrounds degrade the accuracy…
The claim by Gurzadyan et al. that the cosmological sky is a weakly random one where "the random perturbation is a minor component of mostly regular signal" has given rise to a series of useful exchanges. The possibility that the Cosmic…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…
Systematic uncertainties that have been subdominant in past large-scale structure (LSS) surveys are likely to exceed statistical uncertainties of current and future LSS data sets, potentially limiting the extraction of cosmological…
We explore the effect of cosmic radiative feedback from the sources of reionization on the thermal evolution of the intergalactic medium. We find that different prescriptions for this feedback predict quite different thermal and…