Related papers: Is the low-l microwave background cosmic?
The large-scale structure of the Universe is a cosmic web of interconnected clusters, filaments, and sheets of matter. This PhD comprises two complementary projects investigating the cosmic web using correlations between three different…
Recent measurements of a peak in the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background appear to suggest that geometry of the universe is close to being flat. But if other accepted indicators of cosmological parameters are also…
We study inhomogeneities in the distribution of the excursion sets in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature maps obtained by the three years survey of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). At temperature thresholds…
The existence of concentric low variance circles in the CMB sky, generated by black-hole encounters in an aeon preceding our big bang, is a prediction of the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. Detection of three families of such circles in WMAP…
Large-scale anomalies have been reported in CMB data with both WMAP and Planck data. These could be due to foreground residuals and or systematic effects, though their confirmation with Planck data suggests they are not due to a problem in…
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…
We investigate two possible explanations for the large-angle anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): an intrinsically anisotropic model and an inhomogeneous model. We take as an example of the former a Bianchi model (which…
We investigate the dependence of large angular scale cosmic microwave background anisotropies on various initial conditions, including both adiabatic and isocurvature perturbations and the initial power law index $n$, in a variety of…
The cosmic infrared background (CIB) is slightly polarized. Polarization directions of individual galaxies could be aligned with tidal fields around galaxies, resulting in nonzero CIB polarization. We use a linear intrinsic alignment model…
Low multipoles ($l$) in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies have shown some `peculiarities' when examined since the release of the full sky CMB maps, using a variety of tests. In this paper, we concern ourselves with…
We analyse the low--multipole components of the weak-lensing convergence field in a FLRW universe. The low--multipole convergence field, encodes the largest-angle coherent potential gradients, essential for assessment of large-angle…
We investigate the correlation of gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with several tracers of large-scale structure, including luminous red galaxies (LRGs), quasars, and radio sources. The lensing field is…
We consider the hypothesis that nonlocal, omnidirectional, causally-coherent quantum entanglement of inflationary horizons may account for some well-known measured anomalies of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy on large angular…
We present a new limit on the cosmological constant based on the absence of correlations between the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the distribution of distant radio sources. In the cosmological constant-cold dark matter models…
All-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations are usually represented by a spherical harmonic decomposition involving modes labelled by their degree l and order m (where -l < m < +l). The zonal modes (i.e those…
Collisions between cosmic bubbles of different vacua are a generic feature of false vacuum eternal inflation scenarios. While previous studies have focused on the consequences of a single collision event in an observer's past, we begin here…
We examine the possibility that circles in the cosmic microwave background could be formed by the interaction of a gravitational wave pulse emitted in some pre-big-bang phase of the universe with the last scattering surface. We derive the…
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…
Motivated by the large-scale asymmetry observed in the cosmic microwave background sky, we consider a specific class of anisotropic cosmological models -- Bianchi type VII_h -- and compare them to the WMAP first-year data on large angular…
Measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum, or three-point correlation function, has now become one of the principle efforts in early-Universe cosmology. Here we show that there is a odd-parity component of the CMB…