Related papers: Cosmic Mnemonics
The evolution of cosmological large-scale perturbations is described in terms of the concordant model based on the recent discovery of cosmic vacuum. It is demonstrated that the process is robustly controlled by a few epoch-independent…
We investigate the question of how tightly we can constrain the cosmological parameters by using the ``cosmic inversion'' method in which we directly reconstruct the power spectrum of primordial curvature perturbations, $P(k)$, from the…
I present a series of diagrams which illustrate why the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data favor certain values for the cosmological parameters. Various methods to extract these parameters from CMB and non-CMB observations are forming…
The \Lambda CDM standard model, although an excellent parametrization of the present cosmological data, requires two as yet unobserved components, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, for more than 95% of the Universe. Faced to this unsatisfactory…
A generalized quintessence model is presented which corresponds to a richer vacuum structure that, besides a time-dependent, slowly varying scalar field, contains a varying cosmological term. From first principles we determine a number of…
We consider the effects of new light species on the Cosmic Microwave Background. In the massless limit, these effects can be parameterized in terms of a single number, the relativistic degrees of freedom. We perform a thorough survey of…
A simple model of the brane-world cosmology has been proposed, which is characterized by four parameters, the bulk cosmological constant, the spatial curvature of the universe, the radiation strength arising from bulk space-time and the…
The large amount of cosmological data already available (and in the near future) makes necessary the development of efficient numerical codes. Many software products have been implemented to perform cosmological analyses considering one or…
The relic abundance of baryons - the only form of stable matter whose existence we are certain of - is a crucial parameter for many cosmological processes, as well as material evidence that there is new physics beyond the Standard Model. We…
We use cosmography to present constraints on the kinematics of the Universe, without postulating any underlying theoretical model. To this end, we use a Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis to perform comparisons to the supernova Ia Union 2…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) traveled the cosmos long before it reached our telescopes today. Consequently, it is one of the best probes of fundamental processes in the early Universe that we could hope to observe. The cosmological…
We investigate the potential of observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure in the Universe to detect possible modifications of standard inflationary models by physics beyond the Planck…
Studies of galaxy clusters have proved crucial in helping to establish the standard model of cosmology, with a universe dominated by dark matter and dark energy. A theoretical basis that describes clusters as massive, multi-component,…
Departures of the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from a perfect blackbody probe a fundamental property of the universe -- its thermal history. Current upper limits, dating back some 25 years, limit such spectral…
Model selection aims to determine which theoretical models are most plausible given some data, without necessarily asking about the preferred values of the model parameters. A common model selection question is to ask when new data require…
This essay is a nontechnical primer for a broader audience, in which I paint a broad-brush picture of modern cosmology. I begin by reviewing the evidence for the big bang, including the expansion of our Universe, the cosmic microwave…
I review the general aspects of cosmological parameter estimation from observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies in the framework of inflationary adiabatic models. The most recent CMB datasets are…
There is growing interest in using 3-dimensional neutral hydrogen mapping with the redshifted 21 cm line as a cosmological probe, as it has been argued to have a greater long-term potential than the cosmic microwave background. However, its…
Revolutionary advances in both theory and technology have launched cosmology into its most exciting period of discovery yet. Unanticipated components of the universe have been identified, promising ideas for understanding the basic features…
A six parameter cosmological model, involving a vacuum energy density that is extremely tiny compared to fundamental particle physics scales, describes a large body of increasingly accurate astronomical data. In a first part of this brief…