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The lensing power spectrum from cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps will be measured with unprecedented precision with upcoming experiments, including upgrades to ACT and SPT. Achieving significant improvements in…
In many versions of brane model, the modulus field of extra dimensions, the radion, could have cosmological evolution, which induces variation of the Higgs vacuum expectation value, $<H>$, resulting in cosmological variation of the electron…
Recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) results from BOOMERANG, MAXIMA, and DASI provide cosmological constraints on new physics that can be competitive with those derived from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). In particular, both CMB and…
In this article, we describe a new estimate of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) intensity map reconstructed by a joint analysis of the full Planck 2015 data (PR2) and WMAP nine-years. It provides more than a mere update of the CMB map…
We compute the imprints left on the CMB by two cosmic reionization models consistent with current observations but characterized by alternative radiative feedback prescriptions (suppression and filtering) resulting in a different…
In a recent article, a simple `spherical bubble' toy model for a spatially varying vacuum energy density was introduced, and type Ia supernovae data was used to constrain it. Here we generalize the model to allow for the fact that we may…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a unique probe of cosmological parameters and conditions. There is a connection between anisotropy in the CMB and the topology of the Universe. Adopting a universe with the topology of a 3-Torus, or…
We use Cosmic Microwave Background data from the WMAP, SPT, BICEP, and QUaD experiments to obtain constraints on the dark matter particle mass $m_\chi$, and show that the combined data requires $m_\chi > 7.6$ GeV at the 95% confidence level…
We describe and discuss the application of Gumbel statistics, which model extreme events, to WMAP 5-year measurements of the cosmic microwave background. We find that temperature extrema of the CMB are well modelled by the Gumbel formalism…
We discuss how one can reconstruct the thermal history of the Universe by combining cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and gravitational wave (GW) direct detection experiments. Assuming various expansion eras to take place after…
I show that neutral lithium couples strongly to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) through its 6708A resonant transition after it recombines at z~500. At observed wavelengths of <335 micron, the CMB anisotropies are significantly altered…
Recent measurements and analyses from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Collaboration and supernova surveys combined with cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations, indicate that the dark energy density changes over time.…
WMAP observations have accurately determined the position of the first two peaks and dips in the CMB temperature power spectrum. These encode information on the ratio of the distance to the last scattering surface to the sound horizon at…
We compute in detail the rate at which energy injected by dark matter annihilation heats and ionizes the photon-baryon plasma at z ~ 1000, and provide accurate fitting functions over the relevant redshift range for a broad array of…
Spectral features in the CMB energy spectrum contain a wealth of information about the physical processes in the early Universe, z < 2 x 10^6. The CMB spectral distortions are complementary to all other probes of cosmology. In fact, most of…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…
The atomic recombination process leads to a softening of the matter equation of state as reflected by a reduced generalized adiabatic index, with accompanying heat release. We study the effects of this recombination softening and reheating…
Anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have proven to be a very powerful tool to constrain dark matter annihilation at the epoch of recombination. However, CMB constraints are currently derived using a number of reasonable…
We evaluate the expected level of foreground contamination to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarised radiation, focusing on the diffuse emission from our own Galaxy. In particular, we perform a first attempt to simulate an all sky…
Empirical estimates of the band power covariance matrix are commonly used in cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum analyses. While this approach easily captures correlations in the data, noise in the resulting covariance estimate…