Related papers: The Cosmic Microwave Background and Inflation Para…
With the WMAP data we can now begin to test realistic models of inflation involving multiple scalar fields. These naturally lead to correlated adiabatic and isocurvature (entropy) perturbations with a running spectral index. We present the…
Reheating is the the epoch which connects inflation to the subsequent hot Big-Bang phase. Conceptually very important, this era is however observationally poorly known. We show that the current Planck satellite measurements of the Cosmic…
Detailed analyses of the WMAP data indicate possible oscillatory features in the primordial curvature perturbation, which moreover appears to be suppressed beyond the present Hubble radius. Such deviations from the usual inflationary…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation offers a unique window into the early Universe, facilitating precise examinations of fundamental cosmological theories. However, the quest for detecting B-modes in the CMB, predicted by…
Measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy have served as the best experimental probe of the early universe to date. The inflationary paradigm, inspired in part by the extreme isotropy of the CMB, is now a cornerstone in…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) offers a unique window into the early universe, providing insights into cosmological parameters like the Hubble constant. Recent precise measurements of the CMB by experiments like Planck seem to point…
[Abridged] Recent results from the BICEP, Keck Array and Planck Collaborations demonstrate that Galactic foregrounds are an unavoidable obstacle in the search for evidence of inflationary gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave…
I review the present status of the Cosmic Microwave Background, with some emphasis on the current and future implications for particle physics. Conclusions are: gravitational instability in a dark matter dominated universe grew today's…
Details of how the primordial plasma recombined and how the universe later reionized are currently somewhat uncertain. This uncertainty can restrict the accuracy of cosmological parameter measurements from the Cosmic Microwave Background…
A detection of the primordial gravitational wave background is considered to be the ``smoking-gun '' evidence for inflation. While super-horizon waves are probed with cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization, the relic background will…
We present the implications for cosmic inflation of the Planck measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in both temperature and polarization based on the full Planck survey. The Planck full mission temperature data…
We place new constraints on sources of ionizing and resonance radiation at the epoch of the recombination process using the recent CMB temperature and polarization spectra coming from WMAP. We find that non-standard recombination scenarios…
We investigate the hemispherical power asymmetry observed in the CMBR by attributing it to an early inhomogeneous phase of cosmic expansion. Unlike the conventional assumption of a perfectly isotropic and homogeneous pre-inflationary…
With WMAP putting the phenomenological standard model of cosmology on a strong footing, one can look forward to mining the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for fundamental physics with higher sensitivity and on smaller scales. Future CMB…
We investigate a possible asymmetry in the statistical properties of the cosmic microwave background temperature field and to do so we construct an estimator aiming at detecting a dipolar modulation. Such a modulation is found to induce…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
Most of the cosmological information extracted from the CMB has been obtained through the power spectrum, however there is much more to be learnt from the statistical distribution of the temperature random field. We review some recent…
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,…
Most of the analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background relies on the assumption of statistical isotropy. However, given some recent evidence pointing against isotropy, as for instance the observed alignment of different multipoles on large…
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…