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The cosmic microwave background radiation is supposed to be Gaussian and this hypothesis is in good agreement with the recent very accurate measurements. Nonetheless a tiny amount of non-Gaussianity is predicted by the standard inflation…
Primordial gravitational waves are a crucial prediction of inflation theory, and their detection through their imprints on the cosmic microwave background is actively being pursued. However, these attempts have not yet been successful. In…
We show that a conformal-invariance violating coupling of the inflaton to electromagnetism produces a cross correlation between curvature fluctuations and a spectrum of primordial magnetic fields. According to this model, in the case of…
If cosmic inflation suffered tiny time-dependent deviations from the slow-roll regime, these would induce the existence of small scale-dependent features imprinted in the primordial spectra, with their shapes and sizes revealing information…
Density inhomogeneities along the line-of-sight distort fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Usually, this effect is thought of as a small second-order effect that mildly alters the statistics of the microwave background…
Statistical isotropy of primordial perturbations is a common assumption in cosmology, but it is an assumption that should be tested. To this end, we develop cosmic microwave background statistics for a primordial power spectrum that depends…
Whilst current observational evidence favors a close-to-Gaussian spectrum of primordial perturbations, there exist many models of the early Universe that predict this distribution to have exponentially enhanced or suppressed tails. In this…
In the framework of inflationary models with non-vacuum initial states for cosmological perturbations, we study non-Gaussian signatures on the cosmic microwave background radiation produced by a broken-scale-invariant model which…
We analyse the Planck full-mission cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and E-mode polarization maps to obtain constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity (NG). We compare estimates obtained from separable template-fitting, binned,…
This article investigates the non-linear evolution of cosmological perturbations on sub-Hubble scales in order to evaluate the unavoidable deviations from Gaussianity that arise from the non-linear dynamics. It shows that the dominant…
Quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field in the early Universe, amplified by inflation, produce a primordial gravitational-wave background across a broad frequency band. We derive constraints on the spectrum of this gravitational…
We generalize a recently proposed mechanism for the origin of primordial metric perturbations in inflationary models. Quantum fluctuations of light scalar fields during inflation give rise to super-horizon fluctuations of masses and…
We forecast the scientific capabilities to improve our understanding of cosmic inflation of CORE, a proposed CMB space satellite submitted in response to the ESA fifth call for a medium-size mission opportunity. The CORE satellite will map…
Observations of the polarization of the cosmic microwave backround (CMB) have the potential to place much tighter constraints on cosmological parameters than observations of the fluctuations in temperature alone. We discuss using CMB…
On large angular scales (greater than about 60 degrees), the two-point angular correlation function of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as measured (outside of the plane of the Galaxy) by the Wilkinson Microwave…
By using a simple analytical model based on counting random multiple impulses inflicted on photons by a network of cosmic strings we show how to construct the general q-point temperature correlation function of the Cosmic Microwave…
The bispectrum of the microwave background sky is a possible discriminator between inflationary and defect models of structure formation in the Universe. The bispectrum, which is the analogue of the temperature 3-point correlation function…
We give a full analysis of the auto- and cross-correlations between the Stokes parameters of the cosmic microwave background. In particular, we derive the windowing function for an antenna with Gaussian response in polarization experiment,…
We compute the three-point temperature correlation function of the {\it COBE} Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR) first-year sky maps to search for non-Gaussian temperature fluctuations. The level of fluctuations seen in the computed…
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…