Related papers: The Diffuse Light of the Universe - On the microwa…
I present a pedagogical review of inflation and the cosmic microwave background. I describe how a short period of accelerated expansion can replace the special initial conditions of the standard big bang model. I also describe the…
We review the current status of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, including a brief discussion of some basic theoretical aspects as well as a summary of anisotropy detections and CMB experiments. We focus on the description…
I review the discovery of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The underlying theory and the implications for cosmology are reviewed, and I describe the prospects for future progress.
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 blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73K Cosmic Microwave Background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the…
I review the present status of the Cosmic Microwave Background, with some emphasis on the current and future implications for particle physics. Conclusions are: gravitational instability in a dark matter dominated universe grew today's…
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a unique opportunity for a direct study of the primordial cosmic plasma at redshift z ~1000. The angular power spectra of temperature and polarisation fluctuations are…
In forthcoming years, connections between cosmology and particle physics will be made increasingly important with the advent of a new generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Here, we review a number of these links. Our…
Galactic foreground emission plays a key role in cosmic microwave background (CMB) science, particularly for detecting primordial gravitational waves. A well-known lesson is the ``dust wave'' identified by BICEP2 in 2014, which was ruled…
The linear anisotropies in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation and its polarization provide a clean picture of fluctuations in the universe some 370 kyr after the big bang. Simple physics connects these…
The ratio of the self-gravitational energy density of the scattering particles in the universe to the energy density of the scattered photons in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the same in any volume of space. These two energy…
In Luparello et al. 2023, a new and hitherto unknown CMB foreground was detected. A systematic decrease in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperatures around nearby large spiral galaxies points to an unknown interaction with CMB photons…
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…
Anomalies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) refer to features that have been observed, mostly at large angular scales, and which show some tension with the statistical predictions of the standard $\Lambda$CDM model. In this work, we…
Most of the cosmological information extracted from the CMB has been obtained through the power spectrum, however there is much more to be learnt from the statistical distribution of the temperature random field. We review some recent…
We review the theory of the temperature anisotropy and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and describe what we have learned from current CMB observations. In particular, we discuss how the CMB is being used to…
The dimming of Type Ia supernovae could be the result of Hubble-scale inhomogeneity in the matter and spatial curvature, rather than signaling the presence of a dark energy component. A key challenge for such models is to fit the detailed…
A conventional explanation of the dipole anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is in terms of the Doppler effect: our galaxy is moving with respect to CMB frame with $ \sim 600 ~ km ~ s^{-1} $. However, as the deep…
This is a course on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in the standard cosmological model, designed for beginning graduate students and advanced undergraduates. ``Standard cosmological model'' in this context means a Universe…
Some inconsistencies to the assumption of a cosmological origin of the cosmic microwave background CMB, such as the absence of gravitational lensing in the WMAP data, open the doors to some speculations such as a local origin to the CMB. We…