Related papers: Can Self-Ordering Scalar Fields explain the BICEP2…
The BICEP2 collaboration reports a detection of primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode with a tensor-scalar ratio $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ (68% C.L.). However, this result is in tension with the recent Planck limit, $r<0.11$…
The tetragonal heavy fermion compound CeRh2As2 has intriguing low temperature symmetry breaking phases whose nature is unclear. The unconventional superconducting phase is complemented by other normal state phases which presumably involve…
Recent measurements from the BICEP2 cosmic microwave background polarization experiment indicate the presence of primordial gravitational waves with surprisingly large amplitude. If these results are confirmed, they point to a discrepancy…
We examine the recent proposal [1] that the anti-cross-correlation of the scalar and tensor primordial fluctuations reconciles the tension between BICEP2 and Planck observations. We show that unfortunately the contribution from the…
We calculate the cosmic microwave background (CMB) $B$-mode power spectrum resulting from anisotropic cosmic birefringence, without relying on the thin approximation of the last scattering surface. Specifically, we consider the influence of…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarimeters aspire to measure the faint $B$-mode signature predicted to arise from inflationary gravitational waves. They also have the potential to constrain cosmic birefringence which would produce…
In a companion paper we have reported a $>5\sigma$ detection of degree scale $B $-mode polarization at 150 GHz by the BICEP2 experiment. Here we provide a detailed study of potential instrumental systematic contamination to that…
Tangled, primordial cosmic magnetic fields create small rotational velocity perturbations on the last scattering surface (LSS) of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). Such perturbations can contribute significantly to the CMBR…
The simplest interpretation of the Bicep2 result is that the scalar primordial power spectrum is slightly suppressed at large scales. These models result in a large tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. In this work we show that the type of…
Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) is a bolometric polarimeter designed to measure the inflationary B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree angular scales. During three seasons of…
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…
The recent BICEP2 detection of, what is claimed to be primordial $B$-modes, opens up the possibility of constraining not only the energy scale of inflation but also the detailed acceleration history that occurred during inflation. In turn…
We present a demonstration of delensing the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization anisotropy. This process of reducing the gravitational-lensing generated B-mode component will become increasingly important for…
BICEP3 is a 520 mm aperture on-axis refracting telescope at the South Pole, which observes the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at 95 GHz to search for the B-mode signal from inflationary gravitational waves. In…
In this work we present a partially new method to analyze fluctuations which are induced by causal scaling seeds. We show that the power spectra due to this kind of seed perturbations are determined by five analytic functions, which we…
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…
Lensing of the CMB is affected by post-Born lensing, producing corrections to the convergence power spectrum and introducing field rotation. We show numerically that the lensing convergence power spectrum is affected at the $\lesssim 0.2\%$…
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies have revealed a dipolar asymmetry in power at the largest scales, in apparent contradiction with the statistical isotropy of standard cosmological models. The…
Detecting the parity-odd, or B-mode, polarization pattern in the cosmic microwave background radiation due to primordial gravity waves is considered to be the final observational key to confirming the inflationary paradigm. The search for…
Recent detection of $B$-mode polarization induced from tensor perturbations by the BICEP2 experiment implies so-called large field inflation, where an inflaton field takes super-Planckian expectation value during inflation, at a high energy…