Related papers: The CMB flexes its BICEPs while walking the Planck
Due to universality and attractor properties, $\alpha$-attractor quintessential inflation establishes direct relations between inflationary observables such as the scalar tilt $n_s$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, and late-time dark…
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),…
In this paper, we explore the power of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization (E-mode) data to corroborate four potential anomalies in CMB temperature data: the lack of large angular-scale correlations, the alignment of the…
A joint analysis of data collected by the Planck and BICEP2+Keck teams has previously given $r = 0.09^{+0.06}_{-0.04}$ for BICEP2 and $r = 0.02^{+0.04}_{-0.02}$ for Keck. Analyzing BICEP2 using its published noise estimate, we had earlier…
We predict the polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons that results from a cosmic bubble collision. The polarization is purely E-mode, symmetric around the axis pointing towards the collision bubble, and has several…
I present a pedagogical review of inflation and the cosmic microwave background. I describe how a short period of accelerated expansion can replace the special initial conditions of the standard big bang model. I also describe the…
We discuss ability of the harmonic pattern of peaks in the CMB angular power spectrum to test inflation. By studying robust features of alternate models, which must all be isocurvature in nature, we reveal signatures unique to inflation.…
Inflationary models with power-law potentials are starting to be severely constrained by the recent measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies provided by the Planck Satellite and by the BICEP2 telescope. In particular, models…
We present a new model of the microwave sky in polarization that can be used to simulate data from CMB polarization experiments. We exploit the most recent results from the Planck satellite to provide an accurate description of the diffuse…
We explore the relationship between features in the Planck 2015 temperature and polarization data, shifts in the cosmological parameters, and features from inflation. Residuals in the temperature data at low multipole $\ell$, which are…
We discuss several opportunities involving cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations during the post-MAP era. The curl-modes of CMB polarization allow a direct detection of inflationary gravitational waves and a measurement of the…
CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) polarization observations test many aspects of cosmological models. Effective pseudoscalar-photon interaction(s) would induce a rotation of linear polarization of electromagnetic wave propagating with…
The CMB map provided by the Planck project constrains the value of the ratio of tensor-to-scalar perturbations, namely $r$, to be smaller than $0.11$ (95% CL). This bound rules out the simplest models of inflation. However, recent data from…
The temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are supposed to be distributed randomly in both magnitude and phase, following to the simplest model of inflation. In this paper, we look at the odd and even multipoles…
One of the most spectacular scientific breakthroughs in past decades was using measurements of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to test precisely our understanding of the history and composition of the Universe.…
Recent measurements by the {\it Planck} experiment of the power spectrum of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) reveal a deficit of power in low multipoles compared to the predictions from best-fit…
Observations of cosmic microwave background polarisation, essential for probing a potential phase of inflation in the early universe, suffer from contamination by polarised emission from the Galactic interstellar medium. This work combines…
Natural inflation is a well-motivated model for the early universe in which an inflaton potential of the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone form, $V(\phi) = \Lambda^4[1 + \cos{(\phi/f)}]$, can naturally drive a cosmic accelerated epoch. This paper…
A detection of the primordial gravitational wave background is considered to be the ``smoking-gun '' evidence for inflation. While super-horizon waves are probed with cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization, the relic background will…
We show that the Planck 2015 and BICEP2/KECK measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies provide together an information gain of 0.82 +- 0.13 bits on the reheating history over all slow-roll single-field models of…