Related papers: The Cosmic Microwave Background: Spectral Distorti…
Since the temperature fluctuations in cosmic microwave background (CMB) on large-angular scales probe length scales that were super-horizon sized at photon decoupling and hence insensitive to microphysical processes, the low-multipole CMB…
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,…
The Cosmic Microwave Background provides our most ancient image of the Universe and our best tool for studying its early evolution. Theories of high energy physics predict the formation of various types of topological defects in the very…
Cosmic microwave background anisotropies provide a vast amount of information on both structure formation in the universe and the background dynamics and geometry. The full physical content and detailed structure of anisotropies can be…
Deviations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) frequency spectrum from a pure blackbody tell an exciting story about the thermal history of our Universe. In this paper we illustrate how well future CMB measurements might decipher this…
The cosmic expansion history proceeds in broad terms from a radiation dominated epoch to matter domination to an accelerated, dark energy dominated epoch. We investigate whether intermittent periods of acceleration are possible in the early…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) encodes information about the content and evolution of the universe. The presence of light, weakly interacting particles impacts the expansion history of the early universe, which alters the temperature…
We examine the extent to which galactic and extragalactic foregrounds can hamper the detection of primordial Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. We limit our discussion to intermediate angular scales, $10^{\prime}\lsim \theta…
The recent high-quality measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies have presented cosmologists with the possibility of studying the large scale properties of our universe with unprecedented precision. Here I review the…
I discuss how parameters describing inflation in the very early universe may be related to primordial perturbation spectra. Precision observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) such as those provided by the WMAP…
An enormous amount of observations on Cosmic Microwave Background radiation has been collected in the last decade, and much more data are expected in the near future from planned or operating satellite missions. These datasets are a…
The DASI discovery of CMB polarization, confirmed by WMAP, has opened a new chapter in cosmology. Most of the useful information about inflationary gravitational waves and reionization is on large angular scales where Galactic foreground…
As Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurements are becoming more ambitious, the issue of foreground contamination is becoming more pressing. This is especially true at the level of sensitivity, angular resolution and for the sky coverage…
Ever refined cosmological measurements have established the $\Lambda$CDM concordance model, with the key cosmological parameters being determined to percent-level precision today. This allows us to make explicit predictions for the spectral…
Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a long-standing prediction of the standard cosmolgical model, is ultimately expected to be an important source of cosmological information, but first detection has not been…
Recent announcements that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) - the faint remnant of the Big Bang - is polarized have caused a stir among cosmologists. Such polarization has long been predicted but could not be detected, until the recent…
The ratio of the self-gravitational energy density of the scattering particles in the universe to the energy density of the scattered photons in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the same in any volume of space. These two energy…
We review aspects of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectral distortions which do not appear to have been fully explored in the literature. In particular, implications of recent evidences of heating of the intergalactic medium (IGM) by…
The blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73K Cosmic Microwave Background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the…
These lecture notes comprise an informal but pedagogical introduction to the well established physics and phenomenology of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) between big bang nucleosynthesis and recombination. The dominant properties of…