Related papers: Polarization of cosmic microwave background scatte…
This lecture is a sketch of the physics of the cosmic microwave background. The observed anisotropy can be divided into four main contributions: variations in the temperature and gravitational potential of the primordial plasma, Doppler…
Since the first detection by the DASI experiment in 2002, measurements of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have grown into an important role in testing our understanding of conditions in the early universe and…
Recent cosmic microwave background data in temperature and polarization have reached high precision in estimating all the parameters that describe the current so-called standard cosmological model. Recent results about the integrated…
Despite the fact that the physics of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies is most naturally expressed in Fourier space, pixelised maps are almost always used in the analysis and simulation of microwave data. A complementary approach…
Radio interferometers are well suited to studies of both total intensity and polarized intensity fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and they have been used successfully in measurements of both the primary and…
We study particle decay as the origin of dark radiation. After elaborating general properties and useful parametrisations we provide model-independent and easy-to-use constraints from nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background and…
Microwave background polarization, though presently undetected, is a fundamental prediction of any viable cosmological model. These lectures review the theoretical description of polarization, its physical interpretation, and potentially…
These lecture notes present the computation of the full system of Boltzmann equations describing the evolution of the photon, baryon and cold dark matter fluids up to second order in perturbation theory, as recently studied in (Bartolo,…
In addition to its spectrum and temperature anisotropy, the 2.7K Cosmic Microwave Background is also expected to exhibit a low level of polarization. The spatial power spectrum of the polarization can provide details about the formation of…
The polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation will have a distribution of singularities and anti-singularities, points where the polarization vanishes for topological reasons. The statistics of polarization singularities…
These lecture notes cover mainly three connected topics. In the first part we give a detailed treatment of cosmological perturbation theory. The second part is devoted to cosmological inflation and the generation of primordial fluctuations.…
The V-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background is discussed in a weakly magnetized plasma. The VV and VT angular power spectra are computed for adiabatic initial conditions of the Einstein-Boltzmann hierarchy. Depending upon the…
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…
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…
Galaxy clusters will distort the pattern of temperature anisotropies in the microwave background via gravitational lensing. We create lensed microwave background maps using clusters drawn from numerical cosmological simulations. A…
Cosmic microwave background anisotropies provide a vast amount of cosmological information. Their full physical content and detailed structure can be understood in a simple and intuitive fashion through a systematic investigation of the…
We review the physical processes that are thought to produce anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background, focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on the effects of acoustic waves in the early Universe. We attempt throughout to supply an…
These lectures introduce some of the basic theory of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization with the primary aim of developing the theory of CMB polarization from inflationary gravitational waves, as well as some of the related…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy is our richest source of cosmological information; the standard cosmological model was largely established thanks to study of the temperature anisotropies. By the end of the decade, the Planck…
Temperature and polarization variations across the microwave sky include the fingerprints of quantum fluctuations in the early universe. They may soon reveal physics at unprecedented energy scales.