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Analyses of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation maps made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have revealed anomalies not predicted by the standard inflationary cosmology. In particular, the power of the…

In the last few decades, advances in observational cosmology have given us a standard model of cosmology. We know the content of the universe to within a few percent. With more ambitious experiments on the way, we hope to move beyond the…

We describe an alternative approach to the analysis of gravitational-wave backgrounds, based on the formalism used to characterise the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background. In contrast to standard analyses, this approach makes no…

Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have cemented the notion that the large-scale Universe is both statistically homogeneous and isotropic. But is it invariant also under reflections? To probe this we require…

The distribution of arrival directions of cosmic rays is remarkably isotropic, which is a consequence of their repeated scattering in magnetic fields. Yet, high-statistics observatories like IceCube and HAWC have revealed the presence of…

In addition to simple scale invariance, a universe dominated by dark energy naturally gives rise to correlation functions possessing full conformal invariance. This is due to the mathematical isomorphism between the conformal group of…

Although individual observational groups vigorously test their data sets for systematic errors, the pre-WMAP CMB observational data set has not yet been collectively tested. Under the assumption that the concordance model is the correct…

The acoustic peak in the CMB power spectrum is sensitive to causal processes and cosmological parameters in the early universe up to the time of last scattering. We provide limits on correlated spatial variations of the peak height and peak…

We find a unique direction in the CMB sky around which giant rings have an anomalous mean temperature profile. This direction is in very close alignment with the afore measured anomalously large bulk flow direction. Using Monte Carlo…

We propose a new method for extracting the non-Gaussian signatures on the isotemperature statistics in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky, which is induced by the gravitational lensing due to the intervening large-scale structure of…

We present an update to the search for a non-trivial topology of the universe by searching for matching circle pairs in the cosmic microwave background using the WMAP 7 year data release. We extend the exisiting bounds to encompass a wider…

Noncommutative geometry can provide effective description of physics at very short distances taking into account generic effects of quantum gravity. Inflation amplifies tiny quantum fluctuations in the early universe to macroscopic scales…

The first year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) set quantitative constraints on the amplitude of any primordial non-Gaussianity. We run a series of dark matter-only N-body simulations with the WMAP constraints to investigate the…

We present limits to the amplitude of non-Gaussian primordial fluctuations in the WMAP 1-year cosmic microwave background sky maps. A non-linear coupling parameter, f_NL, characterizes the amplitude of a quadratic term in the primordial…

If the primordial fluctuations are non-Gaussian, then this non-Gaussianity will be apparent in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky. With their sensitive all-sky observation, MAP and Planck satellites should be able to detect weak…

The Cosmological Principle assumes a statistically isotropic Universe, but the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) exhibits some anomalous statistical features, such as the hemispherical power asymmetry, that challenge this core assumption.…

A simple method is presented for the rapid simulation of statistically-isotropic non-Gaussian maps of CMB temperature fluctuations with a given power spectrum and analytically-calculable bispectrum and higher-order polyspectra. The…

The report of a significant deviation of the CMB temperature anisotropies distribution from Gaussianity (soon after the public release of the WMAP data in 2003) has become one of the most solid WMAP anomalies. This detection grounds on an…

One of the most powerful tools to probe the existence of cosmic defects in the early universe is through the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. It is well known that computations with causal sources are more involved than the…

(Abridged)Motivated by the recent results of Hansen et al. (2008) concerning a noticeable hemispherical power asymmetry in the WMAP data on small angular scales, we revisit the dipole modulated signal model introduced by Gordon et al.…