Related papers: Mutual Constraints Between Reionization Models and…
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…
The optical depth $\tau$ is the least well determined parameter in the standard model of cosmology, and one whose precise value is important for both understanding reionization and for inferring fundamental physics from cosmological…
I calculate a hybrid cross-power spectrum estimator from the WMAP 5-year CMB temperature maps, discuss the goodness of fit, and then constrain cosmological parameters. The spectrum and results are generally consistent with previous results,…
The temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have been used to set constraints on decaying dark matter models down to keV masses. In this work, we extend these limits down to the sub-keV mass range.…
We investigate constraints on cosmic reionization extracted from the Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. We combine the Planck CMB anisotropy data in temperature with the low-multipole polarization data to fit LCDM models with…
We investigate the observational signatures of three models of the early Universe in the $B$-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. In addition to the standard single field inflationary model, we also consider…
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 thermodynamic and dynamical properties of a variable dark energy model with density scaling as rho_x \propto (1+z)^m, z being the redshift, are discussed following the outline of Jetzer et al. This kind of models are proven to lead to…
The accurate understanding of the ionization history of the Universe plays a fundamental role in modern cosmology. It includes a phase of cosmological reionization after the standard recombination epoch, possibly associated to the early…
We consider the effectiveness of foreground cleaning in the recovery of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization sourced by gravitational waves for tensor-to-scalar ratios in the range $0<r<0.1$. Using the planned survey area,…
We compute the imprints left on the CMB by two cosmic reionization models consistent with current observations but characterized by alternative radiative feedback prescriptions (suppression and filtering) resulting in a different…
Upcoming cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys will soon make the first detection of the polarized Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, the linear polarization generated by the scattering of CMB photons on the free electrons present in collapsed…
The polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)is a powerful observational tool at hand for modern cosmology. It allows to break the degeneracy of fundamental cosmological parameters one cannot obtain using only anisotropy data…
Non-parametric reconstruction or marginalization over the history of reionization using cosmic microwave background data necessarily assumes a prior over possible histories. We show that different but reasonable choices of priors can shift…
The nearly scale-invariant primordial power spectrum provides the standard initial conditions for cosmological perturbations. However, the largest scales remain only weakly constrained by CMB observations, leaving room for deviations such…
As a result of our limited data on reionization, the total optical depth for electron scattering, $\tau$, limits precision measurements of cosmological parameters from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). It was recently shown that the…
In inflationary cosmology, cosmic reheating after inflation sets the initial conditions for the hot big bang. We investigate how CMB data can be used to study the effective potential and couplings of the inflaton during reheating and…
We study the constraints on reionization from five years of WMAP data, parametrizing the evolution of the average fraction of ionized hydrogen with principal components that provide a complete basis for describing the effects of…
We study the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in cold and mixed dark matter (CDM and MDM) models, with non scale-invariant primordial power spectra (i.e. $n \neq 1$) and a late, sudden reionization of the intergalactic…
Given that the reionization history of cosmic hydrogen is yet to be stringently constrained, it is worth checking the prospects of doing so using physically motivated models and available observational data. For this purpose, we use an…