Related papers: Exploring Early and Late Cosmology with Next Gener…
The B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a unique window into tensor perturbations from inflationary gravitational waves. Survey effects complicate the estimation and description of the power spectrum on the…
In cosmological scenarios with thermal inflation, extra eras of moduli matter domination, thermal inflation and flaton matter domination exist between primordial inflation and the radiation domination of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. During…
Inflation, a period of exponential expansion in the early Universe, is considered an important part of the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model, and plays a crucial role in explaining a wide range of current observations. The standard…
Departures of the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from a perfect blackbody probe a fundamental property of the universe -- its thermal history. Current upper limits, dating back some 25 years, limit such spectral…
Recent cosmic microwave background data in temperature and polarization have reached high precision in estimating all the parameters that describe the current so-called standard cosmological model. Recent results about the integrated…
With the release of the data from the Boomerang and MAXIMA-1 balloon flights, estimates of cosmological parameters based on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have reached unprecedented precision. In this paper I show that it is possible…
In this Thesis I discuss several recent results obtained using the CMB spectra measured by Planck and several other cosmological probes. Extensions of the $\Lambda$CDM model are studied, including the presence of an additional sterile…
We investigate the effects of non-zero spatial curvature on cosmic inflation in the light of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy measurements from the Planck 2018 legacy release and from the 2015 observing season of BICEP2 and the…
We constrain the spectrum of primordial curvature perturbations by using recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Large Scale Structure (LSS) data. Specifically, we consider CMB data from the COBE, Boomerang and Maxima experiments, the…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role in cosmology. Besides precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model, observations have also established…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
We argue that observations of the reionization history can be used as a probe of primordial density fluctuations, particularly on small scales. Although the primordial curvature perturbations are well constrained from measurements of cosmic…
We explore a model of the early universe in which the inflationary epoch is preceded by a cosmic bounce, and argue that this scenario provides a common origin to several of the anomalous features that have been observed at large angular…
Thermal inflation is a second epoch of exponential expansion at typical energy scales $V^{1/4} \sim 10^{6 \sim 8} \mathrm{GeV}$. If the usual primordial inflation is followed by thermal inflation, the primordial power spectrum is only…
Observations of redshift-space distortions in spectroscopic galaxy surveys offer an attractive method for observing the build-up of cosmological structure. In this paper we develop and test a new statistic based on anisotropies in the…
The small-scale crisis, discrepancies between observations and N-body simulations, may imply suppressed matter fluctuations on subgalactic distance scales. Such a suppression could be caused by some early-universe mechanism (e.g., broken…
The formation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) provides a very powerful probe of the early universe at the epoch of recombination. Specifically, it is possible to constrain the variation of fundamental physical constants…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…
We show that it is possible to combine an early phase of String Gas Cosmology which can explain the origin of the observed structures on cosmological scales with a short later period of power law inflation which creates spatial flatness.…
The current suite of results from Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy experiments is fulfilling the promise of providing extraordinary levels of discrimination between cosmological models. We calculate a binned anisotropy power spectrum,…