Related papers: Cosmic Microwave Background constraints for global…
Cosmic inflation, a period of accelerated expansion in the early universe, can give rise to large amplitude ultra-large scale inhomogeneities on distance scales comparable to or larger than the observable universe. The cosmic microwave…
We investigate a statistical anisotropy on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) bispectrum, which can be generated from the primordial non-Gaussianity induced by quantum fluctuations of a vector field. We find new configurations in the…
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies have revealed a dipolar asymmetry in power at the largest scales, in apparent contradiction with the statistical isotropy of standard cosmological models. The…
We discuss how in $SO(10)$ grand unification an observable number density of topologically stable intermediate mass ( $\sim 10^{14}$ GeV) monopoles survive inflation driven by a Coleman-Weinberg potential and non-minimal coupling of the…
We have computed an estimate of the angular power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) induced by cosmic strings on angular scales $>~ 15'$, using a numerical simulation of a cosmic string network; and decomposed this pattern…
Context. The existence of a maximum correlation angle ($\theta_{max} \gtrsim 60^{\circ}$) in the two-point angular temperature correlations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, measured by WMAP and Planck, stands in sharp…
Global, symmetry-breaking phase transitions in the early universe can generate scaling seed networks which lead to metric perturbations. The acoustic waves in the photon-baryon plasma sourced by these metric perturbations, when Silk damped,…
The two fundamental assumptions of the standard cosmological model - that the initial fluctuations are statistically isotropic and Gaussian - are rigorously tested using maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy from the…
Cosmic strings, a hot subject in the 1980's and early 1990's, lost its appeal when it was found that it leads to inconsistencies in the power spectrum of the measured cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. However,…
Using a simple analytic model based on seed superposition we obtain the spectrum of microwave background perturbations induced by cosmic strings on all angular scales larger than about 2 armin. We assume standard recombination in an…
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…
To date, no compelling evidence has been found that the universe has non-trivial spatial topology. Meanwhile, anomalies in the observed CMB temperature map, such as the lack of correlations at large angular separations, remain…
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…
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provide increasingly accurate information about the structure of the Universe at the recombination epoch. Most of this information is encoded in the angular power spectrum of the CMB.…
One of the most powerful cosmological datasets when it comes to constraining neutrino masses is represented by galaxy power spectrum measurements, $P_{gg}(k)$. The constraining power of $P_{gg}(k)$ is however severely limited by…
The energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) allows constraining episodes of energy release in the early Universe. In this paper we revisit and refine the computations of the cosmological thermalization problem. For this…
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…
We study how the presence of world-sheet currents affects the evolution of cosmic string networks, and their impact on predictions for the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies generated by these networks. We provide a general…
We constrain plausible dark energy models, parametrized by multiple candidate equation of state, using the recently published Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy data from Planck together with the WMAP-9 low-$\ell$…
We study the observational constraints of CMB temperature and polarization anisotropies on models of dark energy, with special focus on models with variation in properties of dark energy with time. We demonstrate that the key constraint…