Related papers: Planck Data and Ultralight Axions
We reconsider trans-Planckian corrections to inflationary spectra by taking into account a physical effect which has been overlooked and which could have important consequences. We assume that the short length scale characterizing the new…
Planck has produced detailed all-sky observations over nine frequency bands between 30 and 857 GHz. These observations allow robust reconstruction of the primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations over nearly the…
We use cosmological observations in the post-Planck era to derive limits on thermally produced cosmological axions. In the early universe such axions contribute to the radiation density and later to the hot dark matter fraction. We find an…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, such as WMAP and Planck, measure intensity anisotropies and build maps using a linearized formula for relating them to the temperature blackbody fluctuations. However, this procedure also…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are attracting increasing interest since, among other things, they are a prediction of many extensions of the standard model of elementary particles physics and in particular of superstrings and superbranes.…
We review aspects of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectral distortions which do not appear to have been fully explored in the literature. In particular, implications of recent evidences of heating of the intergalactic medium (IGM) by…
The presence of a primordial magnetic field would have induced resonant conversions between photons and axion-like particles (ALPs) during the thermal history of the Universe. These conversions would have distorted the blackbody spectrum of…
We revisit the method of using the photon-graviton conversion mechanism in the presence of the external magnetic field to probe small-scale primordial magnetic fields that may exist between the last scattering surface and present.…
We introduce a pixel space method to detect dipole modulation or hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization. The method relies on the use of squared total polarized flux whose ensemble average picks…
We extend our previous work on the cosmology of Coleman-de Luccia bubble collisions. Within a set of approximations we calculate the effects on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as seen from inside a bubble which has undergone such a…
Axion-photon mixing has been proposed as an alternative to acceleration as the explanation for supernovae dimming. We point out that the loss of photons due to this mixing will induce a strong asymmetry between the luminosity, d_L(z), and…
A persistent signal of power asymmetry on opposite hemispheres of CMB sky was seen in full-sky temperature measurements made so far. This asymmetry was seen in microwave sky from WMAP as well as PLANCK satellites, and calls for attention…
We study anisotropic (patchy) screening induced by the resonant conversion of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons into dark-sector massive vector bosons (dark photons) as they cross non-linear large scale structure (LSS). Resonant…
We discuss how an extended foreground of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can account for the anomalies in the low multipoles of the CMB anisotropies. The distortion needed to account for the anomalies is consistent with a cold spot…
We report on recent results obtained by analyzing axion--photon mixing in the framework of quantum field theory. We obtain corrections to the oscillation formulae and we reveal a new effect of the vacuum polarization due to the non-zero…
Recent experiments suggest that polarized photons may couple significantly to pseudoscalar particles such as axions. We study the possible observational signatures of axion-photon coupling for radiation from magnetic stars, with particular…
We calculate temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for several initial power spectra of density perturbations with a built-in scale suggested by recent optical data on the spatial distribution of rich clusters of…
The Planck collaboration has recently published maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, in good agreement with a LCDM model, a fit especially valid for multipoles l > 40. We explore here the possibility that dark energy is…
Mixing between ultralight bosons and the Standard Model photon may allow access to the hitherto invisible Universe. In the presence of plasma, photons are dressed with an effective mass which will influence the conversion between the two.…
While the observed nearly scale-invariant initial power spectrum is regarded as one of the favorable evidence of the standard inflationary cosmology, precision observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies also suggest…