Related papers: Benchmark Parameters for CMB Polarization Experime…
With polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now detected, and confirmed by several independent experiments, the next goal is to characterise accurately its statistical properties. In these lecture notes we review the physical…
Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies constrain isocurvature fluctuations between photons and non-relativistic particles to be sub-dominant to adiabatic fluctuations. Perturbations in the relative number densities…
The linear anisotropies in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation and its polarization provide a clean picture of fluctuations in the universe some 370 kyr after the big bang. Simple physics connects these…
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…
Measurements of the 2.7 K cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation now provide the most stringent constraints on cosmological models. The power spectra of the temperature anisotropies and the $E$-mode polarization of the CMB are…
The cosmological birefringence caused by the coupling between the cosmic scalar field and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons through the Chern-Simons term can rotate the polarization planes of the photons, and mix the CMB E-mode…
We quantify the limiting factors in optimizing current-technology cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiments in order to learn about inflationary physics. We consider space-based, balloon-borne and ground-based experiments.…
Polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can help probe the fundamental physics behind cosmic inflation via the measurement of primordial $B$ modes. As this requires exquisite control over instrumental systematics, some…
The temperature anisotropies and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a window back to the physics of the early universe. They encode the nature of the initial fluctuations and so can reveal much about the…
String models can produce successful inflationary scenarios in the context of brane collisions and in many of these models cosmic strings may also be produced. In scenarios such as KKLMMT the string contribution is naturally predicted to be…
We report a measurement of the B-mode polarization power spectrum in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the POLARBEAR experiment in Chile. The faint B-mode polarization signature carries information about the Universe's entire…
The search for the curl component (B mode) in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization induced by inflationary gravitational waves is described. The canonical single-field slow-roll model of inflation is presented, and we explain…
The polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a plethora of information about the early universe. Most notably, gravitational waves from the Inflationary epoch (the leading explanation of the origin of the universe)…
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…
We review current observational constraints on the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), with a particular emphasis on detecting the signature of primordial gravitational waves. We present an analytic solution to the…
We use a simple model to investigate the effect of polarized Galactic foreground emission on the ability of planned CMB missions to detect and model CMB polarization. Emission from likely polarized sources (synchrotron and spinning dust)…
We present new measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization from the final season of the Cosmic Anisotropy Polarization MAPper (CAPMAP). The data set was obtained in winter 2004-2005 with the 7 m antenna in Crawford…
Cosmological Birefringence (CB), a rotation of the polarization plane of radiation coming to us from distant astrophysical sources, may reveal parity violation in either the electromagnetic or gravitational sectors of the fundamental…
The recent BICEP2 measurement of B-modes in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background suggests that inflation was driven by a field at an energy scale of $2\times 10^{16}$ GeV. I explore the potential of upcoming CMB polarization…
CMB foregrounds consist of all radiation between the surface of last scattering and the detectors, which can interfere with the cosmological interpretation of CMB data. Fortunately, in temperature (intensity), even though the foregrounds…