Related papers: Planck Data and Ultralight Axions
Recently there has been interest in the physical properties of dark matter axion condensates. Due to gravitational attraction and self-interactions, they can organize into spatial localized clumps, whose properties were examined by us in…
In the presence of a background magnetic field, axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) can be resonantly converted to photons when their mass is nearly equal to the effective photon mass. In this paper, we propose a novel method to constrain…
Statistical Isotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation has been studied and debated extensively in recent years. Under this assumption, the hot spots and cold spots of the CMB are expected to be uniformly distributed over a…
The report of a significant deviation of the CMB temperature anisotropies distribution from Gaussianity (soon after the public release of the WMAP data in 2003) has become one of the most solid WMAP anomalies. This detection grounds on an…
Any neutral boson such as a dark photon or dark Higgs that is part of a non-standard sector of particles can mix with its standard model counterpart. When very weakly mixed with the Standard Model, these particles are produced in the early…
Photons couple to Axion-Like Particles (ALPs) or more generally to any pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson in the presence of an external electromagnetic field. Mixing between photons and ALPs in the strong magnetic field of a Gamma-Ray Burst…
Observations of the temperature anisotropies induced as light from the CMB passes through large scale structures in the late universe are a sensitive probe of the interactions of photons in such environments. In extensions of the Standard…
A variety of beyond the standard model scenarios contain very light hidden sector U(1) gauge bosons undergoing kinetic mixing with the photon. The resulting oscillation between ordinary and hidden photons leads to spectral distortions of…
We study axion strings of hyperlight axions coupled to photons. Hyperlight axions -- axions lighter than Hubble at recombination -- are a generic prediction of the string axiverse. These axions strings produce a distinct quantized…
The main motivation for our work has been a puzzling observation concerning quasars. No one expected the existence of correlations in the polarisation of visible light coming from objects separated by gigaparsecs, until they were first…
The Universe is not perfectly homogeneous, the large scale structure forms overdense regions and voids. In this paper, we consider the possibility that we occupy a special position in our Universe, close to the center of a local underdense…
Various extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of hidden photons kinetically mixing with the ordinary photon. This mixing leads to oscillations between photons and hidden photons, analogous to the observed oscillations…
The latest analysis of the cosmic microwave background by the Planck team finds more smoothing of the acoustic peaks in the temperature power spectrum than predicted by $\Lambda$CDM. Here we investigate whether this additional smoothing can…
Planck's Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization observations are the premier dataset for constraining cosmological models. Cosmic variance limited temperature at large and intermediate scales today dominates the…
We perform an analysis of the CMB temperature data taken by the Planck satellite investigating if there is any significant deviation from cosmological isotropy. We look for differences in the spectrum between two opposite hemispheres and…
We use Bayesian model comparison to determine whether extensions to Standard-Model neutrino physics -- primarily additional effective numbers of neutrinos and/or massive neutrinos -- are merited by the latest cosmological data. Given the…
Measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum, or three-point correlation function, has now become one of the principle efforts in early-Universe cosmology. Here we show that there is a odd-parity component of the CMB…
The structure of the cold spot, of a non-Gaussian anomaly in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky first detected by Vielva et al. is studied using the data by Planck satellite. The obtained map of the degree of stochasticity (K-map) of…
The recent Planck results and future releases on the horizon present a key opportunity to address a fundamental question in inflationary cosmology of whether primordial density perturbations have a quantum or thermal origin, i.e. whether…
The statistical properties of the temperature anisotropies and polarization of the of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation offer a powerful probe of the physics of the early universe. In recent works a statistical procedure based…