Related papers: Is there another coincidence problem at the reioni…
We investigate the possibility that the Universe is reionized by the decay products of heavy particles. In particular we study under which circumstances this decay may produce a significant reionization at high redshift ($z \simeq 20$), as…
The Casimir energy density calculated for a spherical shell of radius equal to the size of the Universe projected back to the Planck time is almost equal to the present day critical density. Is it just a coincidence, or is it a solution to…
Photoionization and its inverse, electron-ion recombination, are key processes that influence many astrophysical plasmas (and gasses), and the diagnostics that we use to analyse the plasmas. In this review we provide a brief overview of the…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…
A common problem in ultra-high energy cosmic ray physics is the comparison of energy spectra. The question is whether the spectra from two experiments or two regions of the sky agree within their statistical and systematic uncertainties. We…
The timescape cosmology represents a potentially viable alternative to the standard homogeneous cosmology, without the need for dark energy. Although average cosmic evolution in the timescape scenario only differs substantially from that of…
Current data of high-redshift absorption-line systems imply that hydrogen reionization occurred before redshifts of about 5. Previous works on reionization by the first stars or quasars have shown that such scenarios are described by a…
Motivated by the current constraints on the epoch of reionisation from recent cosmic microwave background observations, ionising background measurements of star-forming galaxies, and low redshifts line-of-sight probes, we propose a new…
We construct high-precision models of the Universe that contain radiation, a cosmological constant, and periodically distributed inhomogeneous matter. The density contrasts in these models are allowed to be highly non-linear, and the…
We revisit the possibility of constraining the properties of dark matter (DM) by studying the epoch of cosmic reionization. Previous studies have shown that DM annihilation was unlikely to have provided a large fraction of the photons that…
We investigate the characteristic modifications in the evolving cosmological perturbations when dark energy interacts with dust-like matter, causing the latter's background energy density fall off with time faster than usual. Focusing in…
We study the effect of a prolonged epoch of reionization on the angular power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Typically reionization studies assume a sudden phase transition, with the intergalactic gas moving from a fully…
We consider the reionization process in a cosmological model in which dark matter interacts with dark energy. Using a semi-analytical reionization model, we compute the evolution of the ionized fraction in terms of its spatial average and…
We use the new cosmological recombination code, CosmoRec, for parameter estimation in the context of (future) precise measurements of the CMB temperature and polarization anisotropies. We address the question of how previously neglected…
We examine the effects of dark energy dynamics and spatial curvature on cosmic reionization by studying reionization in tilted spatially-flat and untilted non-flat XCDM and $\phi$CDM dynamical dark energy inflation models that best fit the…
Using a Bayesian framework, we quantify what current observations imply about the history of the epoch of reionisation (EoR). We use a popular, three-parameter EoR model, flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of physically-plausible…
The standard cosmological model, with its six independent parameters, successfully describes our observable Universe. One of these parameters, the optical depth to reionization $\tau_\mathrm{reio}$, represents the scatterings that Cosmic…
The recent discovery of a high optical depth tau to Thomson scattering from the WMAP data implies that significant reionization took place at redshifts z~15. This discovery has important implications for the sources of reionization, and…
Axions and other light particles appear ubiquitously in physics beyond the Standard Model, with a variety of possible couplings to ordinary matter. Cosmology offers a unique probe of these particles as they can thermalize in the hot…
A constant-rate creation of dark particles in the late-time FLRW spacetime provides a cosmological model in accordance with precise observational tests. The matter creation backreaction implies in this context a vacuum energy density…