Related papers: The MAXIMA Experiment: Latest Results and Consiste…
Following the recent measurement of the acoustic peak by the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA experiments in the CMB anisotropy angular power spectrum, many analyses have found that the geometry of the Universe is very close to flat, but slightly…
Observational cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in recent years. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation. The transition to precision cosmology…
I review the current status of cosmology as emerging from recent observations of cosmic microwave background anisotropies as well as from other sources of cosmological information.
Accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies with an angular resolution of a few arcminutes can be used to determine fundamental cosmological parameters such as the densities of baryons, cold and hot dark…
Much recent work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has focussed on the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies and particularly on the recovery of cosmological parameters from acoustic peaks in the power spectrum. However,…
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…
Prompted by the recent MAXIMA-1 and BOOMERANG-98 measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy power spectrum, and motivated by the results from the observation of high-redshift Type Ia supernovae, we investigate CMB…
Massive neutrinos were the first proposed, and remain the most natural, particle candidate for the dark matter. In the absence of firm laboratory evidence for neutrino mass, considerations of the formation of large scale structure in the…
BOOMERanG has recently resolved structures on the last scattering surface at redshift $\sim$ 1100 with high signal to noise ratio. We review the technical advances which made this possible, and we focus on the current results for maps and…
The spectral variation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by WMAP was tested using foreground reduced WMAP5 data, by producing subtraction maps at the 1$^\circ$ angular resolution between the two cosmological bands of V…
The past, present and future of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy research is discussed, with emphasis on the Boomerang and Maxima balloon experiments. These data are combined with large scale structure (LSS) information and high…
In this review, we give an overview of some of the major aspects of data reduction and analysis for the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Since its prediction and discovery in the last century, the CMB radiation has proven itself to be one…
Recently high quality data of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies have been published. In this work we study to which extent the cosmological parameters determined by using this data depend on assumptions about the initial…
We re-examine the gravitational wave background resulting from inflation and its effect on the cosmic microwave background radiation. The new COBE measurement of a cosmic background quadrupole anisotropy places an upper limit on the vacuum…
Several anomalies appear to be present in the large-angle cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy maps of WMAP. One of these is a lack of large-scale power. Because the data otherwise match standard models extremely well, it is natural…
We investigate the performance of a large class of cosmic microwave background experiments with respect to their ability to measure various cosmological parameters. We pay special attention to the measurement of the total cosmological…
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…
Long-wavelength gravitational waves can induce significant temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. Distinguishing this from anisotropy induced by energy density fluctuations is critical for testing inflationary cosmology…
Progress in observational cosmology over the past five years has established that the Universe is dominated dynamically by dark matter and dark energy. Both these new and apparently independent forms of matter-energy have properties that…
Observational tests during the next decade may determine if the evolution of the Universe can be understood from fundamental physical principles, or if special initial conditions, coincidences, and new, untestable physical laws must be…