Related papers: Axionic defects in the CMB: birefringence and grav…
We study signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) induced by the presence of strong spatial curvature prior to the epoch of inflation which generated our present universe. If inflation does not last sufficiently long to drive the…
A recently proposed mechanism for large-scale structure in string cosmology --based on massless axionic seeds-- is further analyzed and extended to the acoustic-peak region. Existence, structure, and normalization of the peaks turn out to…
We investigate the cosmic variance of the skewness of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in an inflationary model which leads to the baryon isocurvature scenario for the cosmic structure formation. In this model, the baryon…
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 evaluate the degradation of the accuracy of the component separation between the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and foreground components caused by neglect of absorption of the monopole component of the CMB by the galactic…
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…
We present a search for axion-like polarization oscillations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with observations from the Keck Array. A local axion field induces an all-sky, temporally sinusoidal rotation of CMB polarization. A CMB…
The spontaneous breaking of a $U(1)$ symmetry via an intermediate discrete symmetry may yield a hybrid topological defect of \emph{domain walls bounded by cosmic strings}. The decay of this defect network leads to a unique gravitational…
Although the new era of high precision cosmology of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation improves our knowledge to understand the infant as well as the presentday Universe, it also leads us to question the main assumption of the…
Modern cosmology rests on the working assumption that the Universe is isotropic and homogeneous at large scales. Here, we document a number of anomalous observations pointing to an anisotropic Universe in a direction consistent with the CMB…
Gravitational-wave (GW) signals offer a unique window into the dynamics of the early universe. GWs may be generated by the topological defects produced in the early universe, which contain information on the symmetry of UV physics. We…
We investigate the effect of the stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background produced by kinks on infinite cosmic strings, whose spectrum was derived in our previous work, on the B-mode power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background…
The network of cosmic strings generated in a phase transition during inflation enters the scaling regime later than that of usual strings. If it occurs after the recombination, temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background…
We present results from the first simulations of networks of Type I Abelian Higgs cosmic strings to include both matter and radiation eras and Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) constraints. In Type I strings, the string tension is a slowly…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is affected by the total radiation density around the time of decoupling. At that epoch, neutrinos comprised a significant fraction of the radiative energy, but there could also be a contribution from…
We simulate the anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) induced by cosmic strings. By numerically evolving a network of cosmic strings we generate full-sky CMB temperature anisotropy maps. Based on $192$ maps, we compute the…
Statistical isotropy (SI) of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations is a key observational test to validate the cosmological principle underlying the standard model of cosmology. While a detection of SI violation would have immense…
The standard cosmological model predicts statistically isotropic cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations characterized by the CMB temperature coefficients $a_{\ell m}$ being independent Gaussian random variables with zero mean and…
The B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is an excellent information channel for the detection of relic gravitational waves. However, the detection is contaminated by the B-mode polarization generated by…
We present in detail the convolutional neural network used in our previous work to detect cosmic strings in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropy maps. By training this neural network on numerically generated CMB…