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Spectral distortion anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide a new probe of the early Universe that can be accessed using traditional CMB imaging techniques. It is possible to compute the creation and evolution of…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) energy spectrum is a near-perfect blackbody. The standard model of cosmology predicts small spectral distortions to this form, but no such distortion of the sky-averaged CMB spectrum has yet been…
The cosmological recombination radiation (CRR) is one of the guaranteed spectral distortion signals from the early Universe. The CRR photons from hydrogen and helium pre-date the last scattering process and as such allow probing physical…
We have compared the absolute temperature data of the CMB spectrum with models for CMB spectra distorted by a single or two heating processes at different cosmic times. The constraints on the fractional energy injected in the radiation…
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…
Spectral distortions of the CMB have recently experienced an increased interest. One of the inevitable distortion signals of our cosmological concordance model is created by the cosmological recombination process, just a little before…
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…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectrum is an extraordinary tool for exploring physics beyond the Standard Model. The exquisite precision of the measurement makes it particularly sensitive to small effects caused by hidden sector…
Thermal inflation is a second epoch of exponential expansion at typical energy scales $V^{1/4} \sim 10^{6 \sim 8} \mathrm{GeV}$. If the usual primordial inflation is followed by thermal inflation, the primordial power spectrum is only…
Cosmic string loops contain cusps which decay by emitting bursts of particles. A significant fraction of the released energy is in the form of photons. These photons are injected non-thermally and can hence cause spectral distortions of the…
The measurements of COBE/FIRAS have shown that the CMB spectrum is extremely close to a perfect blackbody. There are, however, a number of processes in the early Universe that should create spectral distortions at a level which is within…
Mixing of blackbodies with different temperatures creates a spectral distortion which, at lowest order, is a y-type distortion, indistinguishable from the thermal y-type distortion produced by the scattering of CMB photons by hot electrons…
We review aspects of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectral distortions which do not appear to have been fully explored in the literature. In particular, implications of recent evidences of heating of the intergalactic medium (IGM) by…
We calculate numerical solutions and analytic approximations for the intermediate-type spectral distortions. Detection of a \mu-type distortion (saturated comptonization) in the CMB will constrain the time of energy injection to be at a…
We propose a method to extract the projected power spectrum of density perturbations from the distortions in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The distortions are imprinted onto the CMB by the gravitational lensing effect and can be…
We develop and examine the principles governing the formation of distortions in the cosmic microwave background. Distortions in the frequency or spectral distribution of the background probe the thermal history of the universe whereas those…
Distortions to the cosmic microwave background~(CMB) blackbody spectrum are calculated in the framework of cosmological perturbation theory. The second order Boltzmann equation is explicitly solved, with the spectral $y$ distortion and the…
We compute the spectral distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization induced by non-linear effects in the Compton interactions between CMB photons and cold intergalactic electrons. This signal is of the $y$-type and is…
We construct a position-space cosmological perturbation theory around spatially flat Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker geometries that allows to model localized primordial sources of gravitational waves. The equations of motion are…
We investigate matter density perturbations in models of structure formation with or without causal/acausal source. Under the fluid approximation in the linear theory, we first derive full perturbation equations in flat space with a…