Related papers: Boomerang returns unexpectedly
If we imagine rewinding the universe to early times, the scale factor shrinks and the existence of a finite spatial volume may play a role in quantum tunnelling effects in a closed universe. It has recently been shown that such finite…
The accelerating expansion of the universe is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades. In this short review, we briefly summarize theories for the origin of cosmic acceleration and the observational methods being used to…
Phase transitions in the early universe can readily create an observable stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that such a background necessarily contains anisotropies analogous to those of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
In the standard cosmological model, the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background is interpreted as variation in the gravitational potential at the point of emission, due to the emitter being embedded in a region ${\cal C}$…
We review the present status of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy observations and discuss the main related astrophysical issues, instrumental effects and data analysis techniques. We summarise the balloon-borne and ground-based…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
The hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background may be explained by the modulation of some primordial cosmological parameter, such as the sound speed of the inflaton. This modulation can be achieved by the perturbation…
Power spectra always play an important role in the theory of inflation. In particular, the ability to reproduce the galaxy matter power spectrum and the CMB temperature angular power spectrum coefficients to high accuracy is often…
The two fundamental assumptions in cosmology are that the Universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic when averaged on large scales. Given the big implication of these assumptions, there has been a lot of statistical tests carried…
Since WMAP and Planck some anomalous features appeared in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) large-angle anisotropy, the so-called anomalies. One of these is the hemispherical power asymmetry, i.e. a difference in the average power on…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
We investigate the potential of observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure in the Universe to detect possible modifications of standard inflationary models by physics beyond the Planck…
We assess two potential signals of the formation of our universe by the decay of a false vacuum. Negative spatial curvature is one possibility, but the window for its detection is now small. However, another possible signal is a suppression…
We have performed a likelihood analysis of the recent data on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) anisotropy taken by the Boomerang experiment. We find that this data places a strong upper bound on the radiation density present…
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…
Recent results from BOOMERANG-98 and MAXIMA-1, taken together with COBE-DMR, provide consistent and high signal-to-noise measurements of the CMB power spectrum at spherical harmonic multipole bands over $2<\ell\lta800$. Analysis of the…
We consider a double-inflationary model with two massive scalar fields interacting only gravitationally in the context of a flat cold dark matter (CDM) Universe. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies produced in…
Homogeneity is a crucial, but poorly tested, assumption in cosmology. We introduce a new approach which allows us to place limits on the presence of localized structures within essentially our entire observable volume, using cosmic…
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…