Related papers: CMB Anomalies after Planck
Analyses of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation maps made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have revealed anomalies not predicted by the standard inflationary cosmology. In particular, the power of the…
Recent satellite observations have revealed significant anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, a phenomenon that had previously been detected but received limited attention due to its subtlety. With the advent of…
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…
Most of the analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background relies on the assumption of statistical isotropy. However, given some recent evidence pointing against isotropy, as for instance the observed alignment of different multipoles on large…
Recent measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that the Universe is flat and that large-scale structure grew via gravitational infall from primordial adiabatic perturbations. Both of these…
We simulate Planck observations by adopting a detailed model of the microwave sky including monopole, dipole, anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and galactic and extragalactic foregrounds. We estimate the impact of main…
Noticeable deviations from the prediction of the fiducial LCDM cosmology are found in the angular power spectrum of the CMB. Besides large-angle anomalies, the WMAP 1st year data revealed a dip in the power spectrum at l \sim 200, which…
CMB full-sky temperature data show a hemispherical asymmetry in power nearly aligned with the Ecliptic. In real space, this anomaly can be quantified by the temperature variance in the northern and southern Ecliptic hemispheres, with the…
We investigate the abundance of large-scale hot and cold spots in the WMAP-5 temperature maps and find considerable discrepancies compared to Gaussian simulations based on the LCDM best-fit model. Too few spots are present in the reliably…
We present posterior sample-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints from Planck LFI and WMAP observations derived through global end-to-end Bayesian processing. We use these samples to study correlations between CMB, foreground,…
In a recent paper, Gurzadyan & Penrose claim to have found directions on the sky centred on which are circles of anomalously low variance in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These features are presented as evidence for a particular…
We investigate whether non-adiabatic perturbations from inflation could produce an asymmetric distribution of temperature anisotropies on large angular scales in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We use a generalised non-linear $\delta…
We discuss several opportunities involving cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations during the post-MAP era. The curl-modes of CMB polarization allow a direct detection of inflationary gravitational waves and a measurement of the…
We present a new and especially powerful signature of cosmic strings and other topological or non-topological defects in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We show that even if defects contribute 1% or less in the…
We study the asymmetric primordial fluctuations in a model of inflation in which translational invariance is broken by a domain wall. We calculate the corrections to the power spectrum of curvature perturbations; they are anisotropic and…
We have estimated the CMB variance from the three-year WMAP data, finding a value which is significantly lower than the one expected from Gaussian simulations using the WMAP best-fit cosmological model, at a significance level of 98.7 per…
We present an assessment of the CMB large scale anomalies in polarisation using the two-point correlation function as a test case. We employ the state of the art of large scale polarisation datasets: the first based on a Planck 2018 HFI 100…
The Microwave Anisotropy Probe and Planck missions will provide low noise maps of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These maps will allow measurement of the power spectrum of the CMB with measurement noise below…
Large-scale magnetic fields affect the scalar modes of the geometry whose ultimate effect is to determine the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB in what follows). For the first time, a consistent numerical approach to the…
Measurements of CMB temperature fluctuations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) indicate that the fluctuation amplitude in one half of the sky differs from the amplitude in the other half. We show that such an asymmetry…