Related papers: Boomerang returns unexpectedly
Cosmology is very exciting for three reasons. There is a very successful standard model - the hot big bang - which describes the evolution of the Universe from 10^{-2} sec onward. There are bold ideas, foremost among them are inflation and…
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have cemented the notion that the large-scale Universe is both statistically homogeneous and isotropic. But is it invariant also under reflections? To probe this we require…
We consider structure formation and CMB anisotropies in a closed universe, both with and without a cosmological constant. The CMB angular power spectrum and the matter transfer function are presented, along with a discussion of their…
General relativity predicts a singularity in the beginning of the universe being called big bang. Recent developments in loop quantum cosmology avoid the singularity and the big bang is replaced by a big bounce. A classical theory of…
It is attractive to suppose for several astrophysical reasons that the universe has close to the critical density in light (~30 eV) neutrinos which decay radiatively with a lifetime of ~10^{23} sec. In such a cosmology the universe is…
The standard big bang cosmology has been greatly successful in explaining many observational aspects of the real universe. However, two particular diffficulties faced by it are the so-called ``horizon'' and ``flatness'' problems. By…
We present the initial conditions for a decaying cosmological perturbation and study its signatures in the CMB anisotropies and matter power spectra. An adiabatic decaying mode in presence of components which are not described as perfect…
We consider a possibility to explain the observed suppression of the second acoustic peak in the anisotropy spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by interaction between a fraction of non-baryonic Cold Dark Matter (CDM) and…
Over the past decades, cosmology has become largely based on experimental data, the most important sources of which are studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). CMB is present in the Universe since the very first moments of its…
We study the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy due to spherically symmetric nonlinear structures in flat universes with dust and a cosmological constant. By modeling a time-evolving spherical compensated void/lump by…
Recent Planck data show the anomalies of CMB fluctuations on large angular scales, which confirms the early observations by WMAP. We continue studying an inflationary model, in which before the slow roll inflation the universe is in a…
A proposal is made for the quantum state of the universe that has an initial state that is macroscopically time symmetric about a homogeneous, isotropic bounce of extremal volume and that at that bounce is microscopically in the ground…
Current observations seem to mildly favor an evolving dark energy with the equation of state getting across -1. This form of dark energy, dubbed Quintom, is studied phenomenologically in this paper with an oscillating equation of state. We…
Precision measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and of the clustering of large-scale structure have supposedly confirmed that the primordial density perturbation has a (nearly) scale-invariant spectrum. However…
The Cosmic Microwave Background fluctuations provide a powerful probe of the dark ages of the universe through the imprint of the secondary anisotropies associated with the reionisation of the universe and the growth of structure. We review…
The primordial bispectrum has been considered in the past decade as a powerful probe of the physical processes taking place in the early Universe. Within the inflationary paradigm, the properties of the bispectrum are one of the keys that…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
In this thesis we investigate several aspects related to the theory of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We develop a new algorithm to calculate the angular power spectrum of the anisotropies which is two orders of magnitude…
During the last years it has become clear that global O(N) defects and U(1) cosmic strings do not lead to the pronounced first acoustic peak in the power spectrum of anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background which has recently been…
For two decades the hot big-bang model as been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not answered by the standard cosmology and…