Related papers: Scalar-tensor correlations and large-scale power s…
The hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background may be explained by the modulation of some primordial cosmological parameter, such as the sound speed of the inflaton. This modulation can be achieved by the perturbation…
The effect of weak gravitational lensing on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies and polarization will provide access to cosmological information that cannot be obtained from the primary anisotropies alone. We…
We present a formalism for analyzing a full-sky temperature and polarization map of the cosmic microwave background. Temperature maps are analyzed by expanding over the set of spherical harmonics to give multipole moments of the two-point…
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…
We investigate the prior dependence on the inferred spectrum of primordial tensor perturbations, in light of recent results from BICEP2 and taking into account a possible dust contribution to polarized anisotropies. We highlight an…
The recent BICEP2 B-mode polarization determination of an inflationary tensor-scalar ratio $r=0.2^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ is in tension with simple scale-free models of inflation due to a lack of a corresponding low multipole excess in the…
BICEP1 is a millimeter-wavelength telescope designed specifically to measure the inflationary B-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) at degree angular scales. We present results from an analysis of the data acquired…
Solid inflation can support a long period of anisotropic inflation. We calculate the statistical anisotropies in the scalar and tensor power spectra and their cross-correlation in anisotropic solid inflation. The tensor-scalar…
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…
We investigate the implications for inflation of the detection of B-modes polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by BICEP2. We show that the hypothesis of primordial origin of the measurement is only favored by the first four…
We compared the Planck 2018 data on the large-scale anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background to the results obtained in the slightly anisotropic ellipsoidal universe. We focused on the quadrupole temperature correlations to better…
The lack of correlations at the long-wavelength scales of the cosmic microwave background spectrum is a long-standing puzzle and it persists in the latest Planck data. By considering the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary wave function as the…
We explore a family of generalised scalar-tensor theories that exhibit self-tuning to low scale anti de Sitter vacua, even in the presence of a large cosmological constant. We are able to examine the linearised fluctuations about these…
Last year we argued that if slow-roll inflation followed the decay of a false vacuum in a large landscape, the steepening of the scalar potential between the inflationary plateau and the barrier generically leads to a potentially observable…
We make a joint analysis of BICEP2 and recently released Planck HFI 353 GHz dust polarization data, and find that there is no evidence for the primordial gravitational waves and the bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio becomes $r<0.083$ at…
A relaxed primordial power spectrum (PPS) of scalar perturbations arising from inflation can impact the dark radiation constraints obtained from Cosmic Microwave Background and other cosmological measurements. If inflation produces a…
Much recent work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has focussed on the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies and particularly on the recovery of cosmological parameters from acoustic peaks in the power spectrum. However,…
We compute the polarization power spectra for global strings, monopoles, textures and nontopological textures, and compare them to inflationary models. We find that topological defect models predict a significant (1 microK) contribution to…
In the standard cosmological model, the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background is interpreted as variation in the gravitational potential at the point of emission, due to the emitter being embedded in a region ${\cal C}$…
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, $r<0.11$…