Related papers: Hemispherical Power Asymmetry from Scale-Dependent…
We consider an inhomogeneous model and independently an anisotropic model of primordial power spectrum in order to describe the observed hemispherical anisotropy in Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. This anisotropy can be parametrized…
Diffusion damping of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum results from imperfect photon-baryon coupling in the pre-recombination plasma. At redshift $5 \times 10^4 < z < 2 \times 10^6$, the plasma acquires an effective…
(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.…
We study the effect of gravitational time delay on the power spectra and bispectra of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropies. The time delay effect modulates the spatial surface at recombination on…
Several statistical anomalies in the CMB temperature anisotropies seem to defy the assumption of a homogeneous and isotropic universe. In particular, a dipole modulation has been detected both in WMAP and Planck data. We adapt the…
The prediction of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature and tensor fluctuations is among the main features of cosmic inflation. The current measurements of the primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
We consider the pre-big bang scenario with a massive axion field which starts to dominate energy density when oscillating in an instanton-induced potential and subsequently reheats the universe as it decays into photons, thus creating…
The atomic recombination process leads to a softening of the matter equation of state as reflected by a reduced generalized adiabatic index, with accompanying heat release. We study the effects of this recombination softening and reheating…
Assuming linearity of the perturbations at the time of decoupling, we reconstruct the primordial scalar potential from the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation. In doing so we derive an…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) would induce non-Gaussianity in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by sourcing recombination perturbations spatially modulated by relative velocities between PBHs and the baryons they accrete. The leading…
We investigate the hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background on small angular scales. We find an anomalously high asymmetry in the multipole range l=601-2048, with a naive statistical significance of 6.5 sigma.…
We investigate new shapes of local primordial non-Gaussianities in the CMB. Allowing for a primordial isocurvature mode along with the main adiabatic one, the angular bispectrum is in general a superposition of six distinct shapes: the…
A complete numerical calculation of the temperature anisotropies and the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is presented for a non zero cross correlation of a stochastic magnetic field with the primordial curvature…
Our peculiar motion with respect to the CMB rest frame represents a preferred direction in the observed CMB sky since it induces an apparent deflection of the observed CMB photons (aberration) and a shift in their frequency (Doppler). Both…
We explicate the origin of the temperature quadrupole in the adiabatic dark energy model and explore the mechanism by which scale invariant isocurvature dark energy perturbations can lead to its sharp suppression. The model requires…
We test the hemispherical power asymmetry of the WMAP 7-year low-resolution temperature and polarization maps. We consider two natural estimators for such an asymmetry and exploit our implementation of an optimal angular power spectrum…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations are used to constrain reheating to Standard Model (SM) particles after a period of inflation. As a light spectator field, the SM Higgs boson acquires large field values from its quantum…
We study single field inflation in noncommutative spacetime and compute two-point and three-point correlation functions for the curvature perturbation. We find that both power spectrum and bispectrum for comoving curvature perturbation are…
Non-Gaussianity of the primordial density perturbations provides an important measure to constrain models of inflation. At cubic order the non-Gaussianity is captured by two parameters $\tau_{\rm NL}$ and $g_{\rm NL}$ that determine the…
We propose a new mechanism to generate density perturbations in inflationary models. Spatial fluctuations in the decay rate of the inflaton field to ordinary matter lead to fluctuations in the reheating temperature. We argue that in most…