Related papers: CMB $\mu$ distortion from primordial gravitational…
We present a pedagogical and phenomenological introduction to the study of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization to build intuition about the prospects and challenges facing its detection. Thomson scattering of temperature…
Skewness of temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) produced by initially Gaussian adiabatic perturbations with the flat (Harrison-Zeldovich) spectrum, which arises due to non-linear corrections to a gravitational…
We discuss the polarization signature of primordial gravitational waves imprinted in cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. The high-energy physics motivated by superstring theory or M-theory generically yield parity violating…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectral distortion from Rayleigh scattering is calculated for the first time in rigorous second-order cosmological perturbation theory. The new spectral distortion is sensitive to acoustic dissipation at…
We examine the contribution of tensor modes, in addition to the dominant scalar ones, on the temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). To this end, we analyze in detail the temperature two-point angular correlation…
The energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) allows constraining episodes of energy release in the early Universe. In this paper we revisit and refine the computations of the cosmological thermalization problem. For this…
Correlations between cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature, polarization and spectral distortion anisotropies can be used as a probe of primordial non-Gaussianity. Here, we perform a reconstruction of $\mu$-distortion anisotropies…
We study diffusion damping of acoustic waves in the photon-baryon fluid due to cosmic strings, and calculate the induced $\mu$- and $y$-type spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background. For cosmic strings with tension within…
To minimize instrumentally induced systematic errors, cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy experiments measure temperature differences across the sky using paires of horn antennas, temperature map is recovered from temperature…
We consider anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) generated by spatially limited seeds; these objects could correspond to relics of high energy symmetry breaking in the early universe. It is shown how the CMB perturbation…
Spectral distortion of the cosmic microwave background provides a unique opportunity to probe primordial perturbations on very small scales by performing large-scale measurements. We discuss in a systematic and pedagogic way all the…
It is commonly assumed that the stochastic background of gravitational waves on cosmological scales follows an almost scale-independent power spectrum, as generically predicted by the inflationary paradigm. However, it is not inconceivable…
Early energy injection to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from dissipation of acoustic waves generates deviations from the blackbody spectrum not only at second-order but also at third-order in cosmological perturbations. We compute…
Damping of primordial gravitational waves due to the anisotropic stress contribution owing to the cosmological neutrino background (C$\nu$B) is investigated in the context of a radiation-to-matter dominated Universe. Besides its inherent…
Spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) may become a powerful probe of primordial perturbations at small scales. Existing studies of spectral distortions focus almost exclusively on primordial scalar metric…
Following the pioneering observations with COBE in the early 1990s, studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have focused on temperature and polarization anisotropies. CMB spectral distortions - tiny departures of the CMB energy…
These lectures introduce some of the basic theory of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization with the primary aim of developing the theory of CMB polarization from inflationary gravitational waves, as well as some of the related…
We review the theory of the temperature anisotropy and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and describe what we have learned from current CMB observations. In particular, we discuss how the CMB is being used to…
We show that inflationary models with broken rotational invariance generate testable off-diagonal signatures in the correlation between the $\mu$-type distortion and temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. More…
Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings…