Related papers: Rescuing Palindromic Universes with Improved Recom…
Standard big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) predicts only a trace abundance of lithium and no heavier elements, but some alternatives predict a nonzero primordial metallicity. Here we explore whether CMB measurements may set useful constraints…
We propose a straightforward and model independent methodology for characterizing the sensitivity of CMB and other experiments to wiggles, irregularities, and features in the primordial power spectrum. Assuming that the primordial…
Inhomogeneous recombination can give rise to perturbations in the electron number density which can be a factor of five larger than the perturbations in baryon density. We do a thorough analysis of the second order anisotropies generated in…
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) holds information about almost all the fundamental cosmological parameters, and by performing a likelihood analysis of high precision CMBR fluctuation data, these parameters can be inferred.…
The concordance model of cosmology predicts a universe which finishes in a finite amount of conformal time at a future conformal boundary. We show that for particular cases we study, the background variables and perturbations may be…
The residuals of the power spectra of WMAP and Planck's cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies data are known to exhibit a few interesting anomalies at different scales with marginal statistical significance. Combining bottom-up and…
Combining cosmological probes has consolidated the standard cosmological model with percent precision, but some tensions have recently emerged when certain parameters are estimated from the local or primordial Universe. The origin of this…
We investigate in detail some popular cosmological models in light of the latest observational data, including the Union2.1 supernovae compilation, the baryon acoustic oscillation measurements from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey, the cosmic…
Models for the latest stages of the cosmological evolution rely on a less solid theoretical and observational ground than the description of earlier stages like BBN and recombination. As suggested in a previous work by Vonlanthen et al., it…
While the standard, six-parameter, spatially flat $\Lambda$CDM model has been highly successful, certain anomalies in the cosmic microwave background bring out a tension between this model and observations. The statistical significance of…
The cosmological recombination radiation (CRR) is one of the inevitable $\Lambda$CDM spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). While it shows a rich spectral structure across dm-mm wavelengths, it is also one of the…
We show that a Universe with a nonminimally coupled scalar field can fit current measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe better than the standard $\Lambda$-Cold Dark Matter ($\Lambda$CDM) model or other minimally coupled dark…
In this work we explore the power of future large-scale surveys to constrain possible deviations from the standard single-field slow-roll inflationary scenario. Specifically, we parametrize possible fluctuations around the almost…
The best-fit values of the density parameter and the amplitude of the linear density power spectrum obtained from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature field scanned by the Planck satellite are found to notably disagree with…
A cosmological scenario where dark matter interacts with a variable vacuum energy for a spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker space-time is proposed and analysed to show that with a linear equation of state and a particular interaction…
Density-reconstruction sharpens the baryon acoustic oscillations signal by undoing some of the smoothing incurred by nonlinear structure formation. In this paper we present an analytical model for reconstruction based on the Zeldovich…
We use statistical inference theory to explore the constraints from future galaxy weak lensing (cosmic shear) surveys combined with the current CMB constraints on cosmological parameters, focusing particularly on the running of the spectral…
Dark matter and dark energy are usually assumed to couple only gravitationally. An extension to this picture is to model dark energy as a scalar field coupled directly to cold dark matter. This coupling leads to new physical effects, such…
The WMAP team has recently highlighted the usefulness of combining the Ly-alpha forest constraints with those from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This combination is particularly powerful as a probe of the primordial shape of the…
The standard cosmological model, LCDM, provides an excellent fit to Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. However, the model has well known problems. For example, the cosmological constant, is fine-tuned to 1 part in 10^100 and the cold…