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There is growing interest in using 3-dimensional neutral hydrogen mapping with the redshifted 21 cm line as a cosmological probe, as it has been argued to have a greater long-term potential than the cosmic microwave background. However, its…
Recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy measurements from the Planck mission have significantly improved previous constraints on the neutrino masses as well as the bounds on extended models with…
Models of the reionization and reheating of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at redshifts $z \gtrsim 6$ continue to grow more sophisticated in anticipation of near-future 21-cm, cosmic microwave background, and galaxy survey measurements.…
We place new constraints on sources of ionizing and resonance radiation at the epoch of the recombination process using the recent CMB temperature and polarization spectra coming from WMAP. We find that non-standard recombination scenarios…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints on dark matter annihilation are a uniquely powerful tool in the quest to understand the nature of dark matter. Annihilation of dark matter to Standard Model particles between recombination and…
We study CMB secondary anisotropies produced by inhomogeneous reionization by means of cosmological simulations coupled with the radiative transfer code CRASH. The reionization history is consistent with the WMAP Thomson optical depth…
Recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) results from BOOMERANG, MAXIMA, and DASI provide cosmological constraints on new physics that can be competitive with those derived from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). In particular, both CMB and…
The paper is devoted to the methods of determination of the cosmological parameters from recent CMB observations. We show that the more complex models of kinetics of recombination with a few "missing" parameters describing the recombination…
Observations of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) have the potential to answer long-standing questions of astrophysical interest regarding the nature of the first luminous sources and their effects on the intergalactic medium (IGM). We…
The recent discovery of a high optical depth tau to Thomson scattering from the WMAP data implies that significant reionization took place at redshifts z~15. This discovery has important implications for the sources of reionization, and…
The density contrast of the Universe, parametrized in terms of the matter power spectrum and its variance, can amplify the signal of the free-free process in the plasma. The damping of fluctuations on scales smaller than the DM particle…
The search for cosmic polarization rotation or birefringence in the CMB is well-motivated because it can provide powerful constraints on parity-violating new physics, such as axion-like particles. In this paper we point out that since the…
We trace the evolution of cosmic microwave background photons propagating through a reionized model universe. The reionization of the intergalactic medium is achieved by UV photons emitted from the decaying `hot' dark matter neutrinos. The…
Spectral features in the CMB energy spectrum contain a wealth of information about the physical processes in the early Universe, z < 2 x 10^6. The CMB spectral distortions are complementary to all other probes of cosmology. In fact, most of…
The ultraviolet background (UVB) emitted by quasars and galaxies governs the ionization and thermal state of the intergalactic medium (IGM), regulates the formation of high-redshift galaxies, and is thus a key quantity for modeling cosmic…
We compute the joint constraints on ten cosmological parameters from the latest CMB measurements. The lack of a significant second acoustic peak in the latest Boomerang and Maxima data favors models with more baryons than Big Bang…
Massive neutrinos modify the expansion history of the universe and suppress the structure formation below their free streaming scale. Cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations at small angular scales can be used to constrain the total…
We perform an analysis of the recent WMAP7 data considering physically motivated and viable reionization scenarios with the aim of assessing their effects on cosmological parameter determinations. The main novelties are: (i) the combination…
Since the B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) was detected by the BICEP2 experiment and an unexpectedly large tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$, was found, the base standard cosmology should at least…
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…