Related papers: Pi in the sky
An unexpected distribution of temperatures in the CMB could be a sign of new physics. In particular, the existence of cosmic defects could be indicated by temperature discontinuities via the Kaiser-Stebbins effect. In this paper, we show…
The angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) contains information on virtually all cosmological parameters of interest, including the geometry of the Universe ($\Omega$), the baryon density, the Hubble constant ($h$),…
This work presents a detailed analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation intensity observations. The CMB is a relic of the Big Bang and its study greatly enhances our knowledge of cosmology. This work has led to new values for…
The problem of separation of different signals in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation using the difference in their statistics is analyzed. Considering samples of sequences which model the CMB as a superposition of signals, we…
Achieving a precise understanding of galaxy formation in a cosmological context is one of the great challenges in theoretical astrophysics, due to the vast range of spatial scales involved in the relevant physical processes. Observations in…
We provide a new derivation of the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and find an exact expression that can be readily expanded perturbatively. Close attention is paid to gauge issues, with the motivation to examine the…
The fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are investigated for a small open universe, i.e., one which is periodically composed of a small fundamental cell. The evolution of initial metric perturbations is computed using the…
The ten's of micro-Kelvin variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation across the sky encode a wealth of information about the Universe. The full-sky, high-resolution maps of the CMB that will be made in…
We review aspects of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectral distortions which do not appear to have been fully explored in the literature. In particular, implications of recent evidences of heating of the intergalactic medium (IGM) by…
We investigate the point-parity and mirror-parity handedness of the large angle anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In particular we consider whether the observed low CMB quadrupole could more generally signal odd…
Since the measurements of COBE/FIRAS in the mid-90's we know that the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is extremely close to that of a perfect blackbody at an average temperature T0~2.726K. However, a number of…
Observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), especially of its frequency spectrum and its anisotropies, both in temperature and in polarization, have played a key role in the development of modern cosmology and our understanding…
Fundamental information about the Universe is encoded in anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. To make full use of this information, an experiment must image the entire sky with the angular resolution,…
We describe and discuss the application of Gumbel statistics, which model extreme events, to WMAP 5-year measurements of the cosmic microwave background. We find that temperature extrema of the CMB are well modelled by the Gumbel formalism…
The recent measurements of the power spectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies are consistent with the simplest inflationary scenario and big bang nucleosynthesis constraints. However, these results rely on the assumption of a…
One of the most powerful tools to probe the existence of cosmic defects in the early universe is through the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. It is well known that computations with causal sources are more involved than the…
Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) contain information which has been pivotal in establishing the current cosmological model. These data can also be used to test well-motivated additions to this model, such as cosmic…
We examine bounds on adiabatic and isocurvature density fluctuations from $\mu$-type spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Studies of such distortion are complementary to CMB measurements of the spectral index and…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been a treasure trove for cosmology. Over the next decade, current and planned CMB experiments are expected to exhaust nearly all primary CMB information. To further constrain cosmological models,…
Beam asymmetries result in statistically-anisotropic cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps. Typically, they are studied for their effects on the CMB power spectrum, however they more closely mimic anisotropic effects such as gravitational…