Related papers: CMB statistical anisotropies of classical and quan…
Inflationary cosmology has proved to be the most successful at predicting the properties of the anisotropies observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this essay we show that quantum field renormalization significantly…
Under the assumption that the concordance Lambda-cold dark matter (CDM) model is the correct model, we test the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data for systematic effects by examining the band pass temperature residuals with…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies that result from quantum fluctuations during inflation are explored and the impact of their ``cosmic variance'' on the ability to use existing data to probe inflationary models is studied. We…
In this talk we elaborate on a mechanism to generate local contributions to the curvature perturbation in isolated patches of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The mechanism, based on the generation of an out-of-equilibrium…
Anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation due to gravity waves are investigated. An initial spectrum of gravity waves may have been induced during an epoch of inflation. We study the propagation of such a spectrum in a…
I give a status report and outlook concerning the use of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies to constrain the inflationary cosmology, and stress its crucial role as an underlying paradigm for the estimation of cosmological…
Inflation provides a unified paradigm for understanding the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the flatness problem, and the origin of large-scale structure. Although the physics responsible for inflation is not yet well…
We use here a family of scaling transformations, that scale key rates in the evolution equations, to analytically understand constraints on light relics from cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps, given cosmological models of varying…
Accurate estimation of cosmological parameters from microwave background anisotropies requires high-accuracy understanding of the cosmological model. Normally, a power-law spectrum of density perturbations is assumed, in which case the…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
In this short review, the predictions of inflation are presented and compared to the most recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy. It is argued that inflation is compatible with these observations but that…
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectral $y$-distortion anisotropy offer a test for the statistical isotropy of the primordial density perturbations on $0.01\lesssim k{\rm Mpc}\lesssim 1$. We compute the 1-point…
We present a simple inflationary scenario that can produce arbitrarily large spherical underdense or overdense regions embedded in a standard Lambda cold dark matter paradigm, which we refer to as bubbles. We analyze the effect such bubbles…
We review the recently found large-scale anomalies in the maps of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. These include alignments of the largest modes of CMB anisotropy with each other and with geometry and direction…
It is shown that only a narrow class of inflationary models can possibly agree with the available observational data on the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). These models may be governed by ``matter'' with the…
We study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies produced by cosine-type quintessence models. In our analysis, effects of the adiabatic and isocurvature fluctuations are both taken into account. For purely adiabatic fluctuations…
Anisotropic inflation is an interesting model with an U(1) gauge field and it predicts the statistical anisotropy of the curvature perturbation characterized by a parameter $g_*$. However, we find that the background gauge field does not…
It has been argued that the large-angle cosmic microwave background anisotropy has anomalies at 3-sigma level. We review various proposed ideas to explain the origin of the anomalies and discuss how we can constrain the proposed models…
One of the major predictions of inflation is the existence of a stochastic background of cosmological gravitational waves (GW). These gravitational waves can induce significant temperature anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background…
We investigate the breaking of global statistical isotropy caused by a dark energy component with an energy-momentum tensor which has point symmetry, that could represent a cubic or hexagonal crystalline lattice. In such models Gaussian,…