Related papers: CMB low multipole alignments in the $\mathbf{\Lamb…
Planck's residuals of the CMB temperature power spectrum present a curious oscillatory shape that resembles an extra smoothing effect of lensing and is the source of the lensing anomaly. The smoothing effect of lensing to the CMB…
It is discovered in our previous work that different observational systematics, e.g., errors of antenna pointing directions, asynchronous between the attitude and science data, can generate pseudo-dipole signal in full-sky maps of the…
If the primordial bispectrum is sufficiently large then the CMB hemispherical asymmetry may be explained by a large-scale mode of exceptional amplitude which perturbs the zeta two-point function. We extend previous calculations, which were…
The large-angle (low-l) correlations of the Cosmic Microwave Background exhibit several statistically significant anomalies compared to the standard inflationary big-bang model, however no connection has hitherto been drawn between them.…
We reconsider the observed CMB dipolar asymmetry in the context of open inflation, where a supercurvature mode might survive the bubble nucleation. If such a supercurvature mode modulates the amplitude of the curvature power spectrum, it…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, such as WMAP and Planck, measure intensity anisotropies and build maps using a \emph{linearized} formula for relating them to the temperature blackbody fluctuations. However such a procedure…
We introduce a class of models in which statistical isotropy is broken spontaneously in the CMB by a non-linear response to long-wavelength fluctuations in a mediating field. These fluctuations appear as a gradient locally and pick out a…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies exhibit a large-scale dipolar power asymmetry. To determine whether this is due to a real, physical modulation or is simply a large statistical fluctuation requires the…
(abridged) We study the impact of the large-angle CMB polarization datasets publicly released by the WMAP and Planck satellites on the estimation of cosmological parameters of the $\Lambda$CDM model. To complement large-angle polarization,…
Unexpected features have been observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature on large scales. We revisit these CMB anomalies using new foreground-cleaned CMB temperature maps derived in a companion paper from WMAP and Planck…
Recent Planck measurements show some CMB anomalies on large angular scales, which confirms the early observations by WMAP. We show that an inflationary model, in which before the slow-roll inflation the Universe is in a superinflationary…
We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief period of…
We use an optimal estimator to study the variance of the WMAP 9 CMB field at low resolution, in both temperature and polarization. Employing realistic Monte Carlo simulation, we find statistically significant deviations from the…
The peculiar motion of an observer with respect to the CMB rest frame induces an apparent deflection of the observed CMB photons, {\it i.e.} aberration, and a shift in their frequency, {\it i.e.} Doppler effect. Both effects distort the…
Measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum, or three-point correlation function, has now become one of the principle efforts in early-Universe cosmology. Here we show that there is a odd-parity component of the CMB…
We constrain the rotation angle $\alpha$ of the linear polarization of CMB photons using the large angular scale (up to $\sim 4^\circ$) signal in WMAP 7 year data. At these scales, the CMB polarization pattern probes mostly the reionization…
Recently, BICEP2 measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) $B$-mode polarization at degree angular scales has indicated the presence of tensor modes with a high tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r=0.2$ when assuming nearly…
Amongst the multitude of inflationary models currently available, models that lead to features in the primordial scalar spectrum are drawing increasing attention, since certain features have been found to provide a better fit to the CMB…
The Doppler dipole signal dominates the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy maps obtained by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission, and plays a key role throughout the data processing. Previously, we discovered a…
We analyze the alignment of the low multipoles (quadrupole and octupole) of various maps of the WMAP 5yr release: the CMB maps obtained with ILC and MCMC methods, the CMB map in the V band after foreground reduction, and, for comparison,…