Related papers: Reconstructing CMB fluctuations and the mean reion…
Cosmic Reionization imprints its signature on the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Advances in CMB telescopes have already placed a significant constraint on the history of reionization. As…
Upcoming cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys will soon make the first detection of the polarized Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, the linear polarization generated by the scattering of CMB photons on the free electrons present in collapsed…
We examine the constraints on the epoch of reionization (redshift z_r) set by recent WMAP-3 observations of tau_e = 0.09 +/- 0.03, the electron-scattering optical depth of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), combined with models of…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints on dark matter annihilation are a uniquely powerful tool in the quest to understand the nature of dark matter. Annihilation of dark matter to Standard Model particles between recombination and…
Recent studies report a mild discrepancy between baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements within the $\Lambda$CDM framework. This discrepancy could be explained if the optical depth $\tau$…
Weak gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is an important cosmological tool that allows us to learn about the structure, composition and evolution of the Universe. Upcoming CMB experiments, such as the Simons…
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) is an invaluable probe of the conditions of the early universe. Recent measurements of its spatial anisotropy have allowed accurate determinations of several fundamental cosmological…
The optical depth $\tau$ is the least well determined parameter in the standard model of cosmology, and one whose precise value is important for both understanding reionization and for inferring fundamental physics from cosmological…
The large-angle polarization anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) arise from Thomson scattering of CMB photons off free electrons in the post-recombination Universe. In the standard $\Lambda$ cold dark matter cosmological…
We represent the reionization history of the universe as a free function in redshift and study the potential for its extraction from CMB polarization spectra. From a principal component analysis, we show that the ionization history…
Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies constrain isocurvature fluctuations between photons and non-relativistic particles to be sub-dominant to adiabatic fluctuations. Perturbations in the relative number densities…
Spectroscopic studies of high-redshift objects and increasingly precise data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are beginning to independently place strong complementary bounds on the epoch of hydrogen reionization. Parameter…
Weak gravitational lensing by intervening large-scale structure induces a distinct signature in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that can be used to reconstruct the weak-lensing displacement map. Estimators for individual Fourier modes…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations effectively measure the basic properties of the universe during the recombination epoch. CMB measurements fix the distance to the surface of last scatter, the sound horizon of the…
We introduce a new statistical technique for extracting the inhomogeneous reionization signal from future high-sensitivity measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization fields. If reionization is…
Gravitational lensing due to the large-scale distribution of matter in the cosmos distorts the primordial Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and thereby induces new, small-scale $B$-mode polarization. This signal carries detailed information…
[Abridged] The polarization of the CMB is widely recognized as a potential source of information about primordial gravitational waves. The gravitational wave contribution can be separated from the dominant CMB polarization created by…
We analyze simulated maps of the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) experiment and recover a nearly cosmic-variance limited estimate of the reionization optical depth $\tau$. We use a power spectrum-based likelihood to…
Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background by large-scale structure in the late universe is both a source of cosmological information and a potential contaminant of primordial gravity waves. Because lensing imprints growth of…
We review the observable consequences of the epoch of reionization (EoR) on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and the resulting constraints on the EoR. We discuss how Thomson scattering with the free electrons produced during EoR…