Related papers: Measuring the Duration of Last Scattering
The anisotropy study cosmic microwave background (CMB) is one of the main observational tools for modern cosmology. However, alongside the study of the thermal fluctuations of the CMB are other equally important information, which is known…
Anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) contain a wealth of information about the past history of the universe and the present values of cosmological parameters. I ouline some of the theoretical advances of the last few years.…
The power spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) depends on most of the key cosmological parameters. Accurate future measurements of this power spectrum might therefore allow us to determine h, Omega, Omega_b,…
We extend our recent work on the effects of a time-varying fine-structure constant $\alpha$ in the cosmic microwave background, by providing a thorough analysis of the degeneracies between $\alpha$ and the other cosmological parameters, and…
Searches for primordial gravitational waves have resulted in constraints in a large frequency range from a variety of sources. The standard Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) technique is to parameterise the tensor power spectrum in terms of…
The Rayleigh scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons off the neutral hydrogen produced during recombination effectively creates an additional scattering surface after recombination that encodes new cosmological information,…
The recombination history of the Universe depends exponentially on the temperature, T_0, of the cosmic microwave background. Therefore tiny changes of T_0 are expected to lead to significant changes in the free electron fraction. Here we…
This is the obligatory Cosmic Microwave Background review. I discuss the current status of CMB anisotropies, together with some points on the related topic of the Far-Infrared Background. We have already learned a number of important things…
We demonstrate that recent measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropy made by the ACBAR, QUAD and BICEP experiments substantially improve the cosmological constraints on possible variations of the…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) offers a unique window into the early universe, providing insights into cosmological parameters like the Hubble constant. Recent precise measurements of the CMB by experiments like Planck seem to point…
Very small mean curvature is a robust prediction of inflation worth rigorous checking. Since current constraints are derived from determinations of the angular-diameter distance to the CMB last-scattering surface, which is also affected by…
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 key assumption of the standard cosmological model is that the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation scales with cosmological redshift $z$ as $T_{\rm CMB}(z) \propto (1+z)$ at all times after recombination at…
Several cosmological measurements have attained significant levels of maturity and accuracy over the last decade. Continuing this trend, future observations promise measurements of the statistics of the cosmic mass distribution at an…
Future Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments will deliver extremely accurate measurements of the E-modes pattern of the CMB polarization field. Given the sharpness of the E-modes transfer functions, such surveys make for a powerful…
The statistical properties of a map of the primary fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) may be specified to high accuracy by a few thousand power spectra measurements, provided the fluctuations are gaussian, yet the number…
The measurements of the statistical properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations enable us to probe the physics of the very early Universe especially at the epoch of inflation. A particular interest lays on the detection…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) represents a unique source for the study of gravitational lensing. It is extended across the entire sky, partially polarized, located at the extreme distance of z=1100, and is thought to have the…
In addition to its spectrum and temperature anisotropy, the 2.7K Cosmic Microwave Background is also expected to exhibit a low level of polarization. The spatial power spectrum of the polarization can provide details about the formation of…
The linear polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is highly sensitive to parity-violating physics at the surface of last scattering, which might cause mixing of E and B modes, an effect known as {\it cosmic birefringence}.…