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Unexpected features have been observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature on large scales. We revisit these CMB anomalies using new foreground-cleaned CMB temperature maps derived in a companion paper from WMAP and Planck…

We present an efficient numerical code and conduct, for the first time, a null and model-independent CMB test of statistical isotropy using Multipole Vectors (MVs) at all scales. Because MVs are insensitive to the angular power spectrum…

We provide a new analysis technique to measure the effect of the isotropic polarization rotation, induced by e.g. the isotropic cosmic birefringence from axion-like particles and a miscalibration of CMB polarization angle, via mode coupling…

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a fundamental observational tool in modern cosmology. The linear polarization of the CMB provides a crucial observational tool for exploring new physics, including the inflationary paradigm and…

We describe a sampling method to estimate the polarized CMB signal from observed maps of the sky. We use a Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm to estimate the polarized CMB map, containing Q and U Stokes parameters at each pixel, and its…

The angular power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies is a key tool to study the Universe. However, it is blind to the presence of non--Gaussianities and deviations from statistical isotropy, which instead can be…

We consider several factors concerning the design of observing strategies in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy experiments. First we consider the number of independent points on the sky one should observe given a fixed observing…

Recent progress in high sensitivity Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization experiments opens up a window on large scale structure (LSS), as CMB polarization fluctuations on small angular scales can arise from a combination of LSS…

We introduce a simple yet powerful {\it analytic} method which obtains the structure of cosmic microwave background anisotropies to better than 5-10\% in temperature fluctuations on {\it all} scales. It is applicable to {\it any} model in…

The ellipticity of the anisotropy spots of the Cosmic Microwave Background measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has been studied. We find an average ellipticity of about 2, confirming with a far larger statistics…

We present a new and especially powerful signature of cosmic strings and other topological or non-topological defects in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We show that even if defects contribute 1% or less in the…

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy constrains the geometry of the Universe because the positions of the acoustic peaks of the angular power spectrum depend strongly on the curvature of underlying three-dimensional space. In…

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) is an invaluable probe of the conditions of the early universe. Recent measurements of its spatial anisotropy have allowed accurate determinations of several fundamental cosmological…

We review the theoretical implications of the past decade of CMB anisotropy measurements, which culminated in the recent detection of the first feature in the power spectrum, and discuss the tests available to the next decade of…

As cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons traverse the Universe, anisotropies can be induced via Thomson scattering (proportional to the integrated electron density; optical depth) and inverse Compton scattering (proportional to the…

Observational Cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in the past decade. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation Measurements of CMB anisotropy and,…

Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by interferometers offer several advantages over single-dish observations. The formalism for analyzing interferometer CMB data is well developed in the flat-sky approximation,…

We test anisotropic dark energy models with the 7-year WMAP temperature observations data. In the presence of imperfect sources, due to large-scale gradients or anisotropies in the dark energy field, the CMB sky will be distorted…

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides us with our most direct observational window to the early universe. Observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the CMB have played a critical role in defining the…

We present local extrema studies of two models that introduce a preferred direction into the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature field. In particular, we make a frequentist comparison of the one- and two-point statistics…