Related papers: Cosmology Rounding the Cape
This set of lectures provides an overview of the basic theory and phenomenology of the cosmic microwave background. Topics include a brief historical review; the physics of temperature and polarization fluctuations; acoustic oscillations of…
We study the complex visibilities of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies that are observables in interferometric observations of the cosmic microwave background, using the multipole expansion methods commonly adopted in analyzing…
There is tentative evidence for a mismatch between the rest frames of matter and the cosmic microwave background, the "quasar dipole anomaly". We consider such a dipole in tilted anisotropic models, for a range of scenarios and sources:…
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…
We analyze the spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in the timescape cosmology: a potentially viable alternative to homogeneous isotropic cosmologies without dark energy. We exploit the fact that the timescape…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) traveled the cosmos long before it reached our telescopes today. Consequently, it is one of the best probes of fundamental processes in the early Universe that we could hope to observe. The cosmological…
We review the basic hypotheses which motivate the statistical framework used to analyze the cosmic microwave background, and how that framework can be enlarged as we relax those hypotheses. In particular, we try to separate as much as…
The Planck experiment will soon provide a very accurate measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies. This will let cosmologists determine most of the cosmological parameters with unprecedented accuracy. Future experiments will…
We question the global universe isotropy by probing the alignment of local structures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The original method proposed relies on a steerable wavelet decomposition of the CMB signal on the…
The anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide our best laboratory for testing models of the formation and evolution of large-scale structure. The rich features in the cosmic microwave background anisotropy spectrum, in…
I present a series of diagrams which illustrate why the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data favor certain values for the cosmological parameters. Various methods to extract these parameters from CMB and non-CMB observations are forming…
Several cosmological measurements have attained significant levels of maturity and accuracy over the last decade. Continuing this trend, future observations promise measurements of the statistics of the cosmic mass distribution at an…
We aim to present a tutorial on the detection, parameter estimation and statistical analysis of compact sources (far galaxies, galaxy clusters and Galactic dense emission regions) in cosmic microwave background observations. The topic is of…
Some form of missing energy may account for the difference between the observed cosmic matter density and the critical density. Two leading candidates are a cosmological constant and quintessence (a time-varying, inhomogenous component with…
This article briefly summarizes the increasingly precise observational estimates of the cosmological parameters. After three years on the stump, the Lambda-CDM model is still the leading candidate. Although the Universe is expanding, our…
The anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation contains information about the contents and history of the universe. We report new limits on cosmological parameters derived from the angular power spectrum measured in the first…
We develop a theoretical framework to describe the cosmological observables on the past light cone such as the luminosity distance, weak lensing, galaxy clustering, and the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. We consider that all the…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy may result from both scalar and tensor perturbations. For a sufficiently narrow range of angular scales, CMB perturbations can be characterized by four parameters. Results from the Cosmic…
This paper presents a complete analysis of the effects of second order gravitational perturbations on Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies, taking explicitly into account scalar, vector and tensor modes. We also consider the second…
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…