Related papers: Can weak lensing surveys confirm BICEP2 ?
Polarimetry of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) represents one of the possible diagnostics aimed at testing large-scale magnetism at the epoch of the photon decoupling. The propagation of electromagnetic disturbances in a magnetized…
We report a measurement of the B-mode polarization power spectrum in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the POLARBEAR experiment in Chile. The faint B-mode polarization signature carries information about the Universe's entire…
We demonstrate that, for the baseline design of the CORE satellite mission, the polarized foregrounds can be controlled at the level required to allow the detection of the primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) $B$-mode polarization…
Cosmological Birefringence (CB) is a phenomenon, caused by parity violating modifications to electrodynamics, whereby the linear polarisation angle of light changes as photons traverse a vacuum. It is possible to use a number of different…
Primordial B-mode detection is one of the main goals of next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Primordial B-modes are a unique signature of primordial gravitational waves (PGWs). However, the gravitational…
A detection of excess cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization on large scales allows the possibility of measuring not only the amplitude of these fluctuations but also their scale dependence, which can be parametrized as the…
It has been pointed out that the spurious Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) B-mode polarization signals caused by the absorption of the CMB monopole component due to the Galactic interstellar matter, called the CMB shadow, degrade the…
We discuss a possibility to directly reconstruct the CMB polarization field at the last scattering surface by accounting for modifications imposed by the gravitational lensing effect. The suggested method requires a tracer field of the…
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…
We investigate the performance of a simple Bayesian fitting approach to correct the cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization for gravitational lensing effects in the recovered probability distribution of the tensor-to-scalar…
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…
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) is an invaluable probe of the conditions of the early universe. Recent measurements of its spatial anisotropy have allowed accurate determinations of several fundamental cosmological…
Cosmological Birefringence (CB), a rotation of the polarization plane of radiation coming to us from distant astrophysical sources, may reveal parity violation in either the electromagnetic or gravitational sectors of the fundamental…
The polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is encoded with exactly the same cosmic information as the CMB's temperature anistropy. However, polarization has the additional promise of accurately probing the reionization…
A stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) will affect the CMB anisotropies via weak lensing. Unlike weak lensing due to large scale structure which only deflects photon trajectories, a SGWB has an additional effect of rotating the…
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 investigate which practical constraints are imposed by foregrounds to the detection of the B-mode polarization generated by gravitational waves in the case of experiments of the type currently being planned. Because the B-mode signal is…
Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization field has been recognized as a potentially valuable probe of the cosmological density field. We apply likelihood-based techniques to the problem of lensing of CMB…
We have updated our analysis of the 9-year WMAP data using the collection of polarization maps looking for the presence of additional evidence for a finite 'cosmic ray foreground' for the CMB. We have given special attention to high…
We report on the design and performance of the BICEP2 instrument and on its three-year data set. BICEP2 was designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) on angular scales of 1 to 5 degrees ($\ell$=40-200),…