Related papers: Is There a Detectable Vishniac Effect?
The cosmic microwave background provides constraints on the annihilation and decay of light dark matter at redshifts between 100 and 1000, the strength of which depends upon the fraction of energy ending up in the form of electrons and…
The reionization process is driven by ionizing photons from dwarf galaxies in halos with virial temperature $T_{\rm vir} \gtrsim 10^4$ K, while minihalos whose $T_{\rm vir}\lesssim 10^4$ K consume ionizing photons and have negative…
We study constraints on allowed reionization histories by comparing predictions of a physical semi-numerical model with secondary temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Our model has four free…
WMAP's detection of high electron-scattering optical depth suggests substantial star formation at high redshift z~17 +/- 5. On the other hand, the recovered sigma_8 ~ 0.84 +/-0.04 disfavors a cluster Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) origin for the…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations effectively measure the basic properties of the universe during the recombination epoch. CMB measurements fix the distance to the surface of last scatter, the sound horizon of the…
We examine the constraints on the epoch of reionization (redshift z_r) set by recent WMAP-3 observations of tau_e = 0.09 +/- 0.03, the electron-scattering optical depth of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), combined with models of…
WMAP and Planck may have uncovered several anomalies in the full CMB sky that could indicate possible new physics driving the growth of density fluctuations in the early Universe. These include an unusually low power at the largest scales…
Upcoming cosmic shear analyses will precisely measure the cosmic matter distribution at low redshifts. At these redshifts, the matter distribution is affected by galaxy formation physics, primarily baryonic feedback from star formation and…
We calculate the angular power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature fluctuations induced by the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect from the epoch of reionization (EOR). We use detailed N-body+radiative transfer…
The Rees-Sciama (RS) effect produces fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) through the time-dependent gravitational potential in the nonlinear stages of evolution. I investigate the RS effect on the CMB angular power…
The fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are investigated for a small open universe, i.e., one which is periodically composed of a small fundamental cell. The evolution of initial metric perturbations is computed using the…
We investigate the possibility that the Universe is reionized by the decay products of heavy particles. In particular we study under which circumstances this decay may produce a significant reionization at high redshift ($z \simeq 20$), as…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) energy spectrum is a near-perfect blackbody. The standard model of cosmology predicts small spectral distortions to this form, but no such distortion of the sky-averaged CMB spectrum has yet been…
Primordial tangled cosmological Magnetic Fields source rotational velocity perturbations of the baryon fluid, even in the post-recombination universe. These vortical modes inturn leave a characteristic imprint on the temperature anisotropy…
Standard inflationary hot big bang cosmology predicts small fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with isotropic Gaussian statistics. All measurements support the standard theory, except for a few anomalies discovered in the…
The coupling of photons and baryons by Thomson scattering in the early universe imprints features in both the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and matter power spectra. The former have been used to constrain a host of cosmological…
The generation of white noise on large scales is a generic property of the dynamics of physical systems described by local non-linear partial differential equations. Non-linearities prevent the small scale dynamics from being erased by…
We propose a cross-internal linear combination (cross-ILC) approach to measure the small-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies robustly against the contamination from astrophysical signals. In particular, we focus on the…
We review the observable consequences of the epoch of reionization (EoR) on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and the resulting constraints on the EoR. We discuss how Thomson scattering with the free electrons produced during EoR…
Measurements of secondary cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies, such as the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect, will enable new tests of neutrino and dark sector properties. The kinetic SZ (kSZ) effect is produced by cosmological…