Related papers: Fitting BICEP2 with defects, primordial gravitatio…
We investigate which of the exotic Doppler peak features found for textures and cosmic strings are generic novelties pertaining to defects. We find that the ``out of phase'' texture signature is an accident. Generic defects, when they…
Detection of B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is one of the frontiers of observational cosmology. Because they are an order of magnitude fainter than E-modes, it is quite a challenge to detect B-modes.…
A (very) brief review of topological defects and their possible cosmic roles. I emphasize in particular that superheavy defects needed for structure formation can peacefully coexist with inflation, despite the claims to the contrary which…
Several assumptions at the foundation of the standard cosmological model have as a direct consequence a specific relation between cosmological distances, known as the distance duality relation, whose violation would be a smoking gun of…
We present new constraints on gravitational vector perturbations ($\mathcal{V}$-modes) using Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data, including temperature and $E$-mode polarization from SPT-3G D1, ACT-DR6, and $Planck$, as well as $B$-mode…
String models can produce successful inflationary scenarios in the context of brane collisions and in many of these models cosmic strings may also be produced. In scenarios such as KKLMMT the string contribution is naturally predicted to be…
We show that three-dimensional information is critical to discerning the effects of parity violation in the primordial gravity-wave background. If present, helical gravity waves induce parity-violating correlations in the cosmic microwave…
We study the possibility of explaining the recently found anomalies in B-meson decays within scenarios with a composite Higgs boson. This class of models provides a natural way to fit the experimental results, interpreting the anomalies as…
Primordial gravitational waves leave a characteristic imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in the form of $B$-mode polarization. Photons are also deflected by large scale gravitational waves which intervene between the source…
The hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background may be explained by the modulation of some primordial cosmological parameter, such as the sound speed of the inflaton. This modulation can be achieved by the perturbation…
We point out three correlated predictions of the axion monodromy inflation model: large amplitude of gravitational waves, suppression of power on horizon scales and on scales relevant for the formation of dwarf galaxies. While these…
The dynamics of coalescing compact binaries can be affected by the environment in which the systems evolve, leaving detectable signatures into the emitted gravitational signal. In this paper we investigate the ability of gravitational-wave…
In this paper, we explore the power of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization (E-mode) data to corroborate four potential anomalies in CMB temperature data: the lack of large angular-scale correlations, the alignment of the…
As ever-more sensitive experiments are made in the quest for primordial CMB B Modes, the number of potentially significant astrophysical contaminants becomes larger as well. Thermal emission from interplanetary dust, for example, has been…
Polarized dust emission is a key tracer in the study of interstellar medium and of star formation. The observed polarization, however, is a product of magnetic field structure, dust grain properties and grain alignment efficiency, as well…
Thermal dust is the major polarized foreground hindering the detection of primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-modes. Its signal exhibits complex behavior in frequency space, arising from the combined variation in our Galaxy of…
A large-scale temperature perturbation has a non-zero correlation with the power spectrum of B-modes of cosmological origin on short scales while the corresponding correlation is expected to be zero for B-modes sourced by galactic…
A stochastic background of primordial gravitational waves could be detected soon in the polarization of the CMB and/or with laser interferometers. There are at least three GWB coming from inflation: those produced during inflation and…
The discrepancy between the Hubble parameter inferred from local measurements and that from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has motivated careful scrutiny of the assumptions that enter both analyses. Here we point out that the…
We investigate the weak lensing corrections to the CMB temperature and polarization anisotropies. We consider all the effects beyond the leading order: post-Born corrections, LSS corrections and, for the polarization anisotropies, the…