Related papers: Did BICEP2 see vector modes? First B-mode constrai…
We report on the design and performance of the BICEP2 instrument and on its three-year data set. BICEP2 was designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) on angular scales of 1 to 5 degrees ($\ell$=40-200),…
Inflation predicts B-mode polarization with correlations that span superhorizon scales at recombination. In contrast, the correlations set up by causal sources, such as phase transitions or defects, necessarily vanish on superhorizon…
Cosmological defects result from cosmological phase transitions in the early Universe and the dynamics reflects their symmetry-breaking mechanisms. These cosmological defects may be probed through weak lensing effects because they interact…
We present the first calculation of the possible (local) cosmic string contribution to the cosmic microwave background polarization spectra from simulations of a string network (rather than a stochastic collection of unconnected string…
Cosmic strings are topological defects possibly formed in the early Universe, which may be observable due to their gravitational effects on the cosmic microwave background radiation or gravitational wave experiments. To this effect it is…
We investigate the effect of the stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background produced by kinks on infinite cosmic strings, whose spectrum was derived in our previous work, on the B-mode power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background…
We analyse CMB constraints on stable networks of cosmic strings and domain walls using for the first time full Planck 2018 data together with BICEP/Keck 2018 $B$-mode measurements. The defect-induced anisotropies are computed using the…
It is known that in contrast with the E-mode polarization, the B-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background cannot be generated by the Compton scattering in the case of scalar mode of metric perturbation. However it is possible to…
We consider a novel contribution to the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background induced by vector and tensor modes generated by the non-linear evolution of primordial scalar perturbations. Our calculation is based on relativistic…
We study the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarisation spectra sourced by multi-tension cosmic superstring networks. First we obtain solutions for the characteristic length scales and velocities associated with the evolution…
The recent BICEP2 measurement of B-modes in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background suggests that inflation was driven by a field at an energy scale of $2\times 10^{16}$ GeV. I explore the potential of upcoming CMB polarization…
Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by BOOMERANG and MAXIMA collaborations have tightened the observational constraints on theories of structure formation. They disagree with the predictions of…
Weak gravitational lensing by the large scale structure can be used to probe the dark matter distribution in the Universe directly and thus to probe cosmological models. The recent detection of cosmic shear by several groups has…
The BICEP2 collaboration reported recently a B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation inconsistent with the null hypothesis at a significance of > 5 {\sigma}. This result has been often interpreted as a…
Probing primordial curvature perturbations on small scales, beyond those accessible using cosmic microwave background (CMB) primary anisotropies and Lyman-$\alpha$ forest data, remains a major open challenge. Current constraints on the…
The recent indications for a tensor-to-scalar ratio $ r \simeq 0.2$ from BICEP2 measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization present some tension with upper limits $r \lesssim 0.1$ from measurements of CMB…
Cosmological Birefringence (CB) is a phenomenon, caused by parity violating modifications to electrodynamics, whereby the linear polarisation angle of light changes as photons traverse a vacuum. It is possible to use a number of different…
The vector mode of cosmological perturbation theory imprints characteristic signals on the weak lensing signals such as curl- and B-modes which are never imprinted by the scalar mode. However, the vector mode is neglected in the standard…
On the basis of the quantum Boltzmann equation governing the time-evolution of the density matrix of polarized CMB photons in the primordial scalar perturbations of metric, we calculate the B-mode spectrum of polarized CMB photons…
A B-mode polarization signal in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is widely regarded as smoking gun evidence for gravitational waves produced during inflation. Here, we demonstrate that tensor perturbations sourced during…