Related papers: The Cosmic Microwave Background and Its Polarizati…
The polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is encoded with exactly the same cosmic information as the CMB's temperature anistropy. However, polarization has the additional promise of accurately probing the reionization…
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…
We review the current status and future plans for polarization measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, as well as the cosmology these measurements will address. After a long period of increasingly sensitive upper limits,…
The DASI discovery of CMB polarization has opened a new chapter in cosmology. Most of the useful information about inflationary gravitational waves and reionization is on large angular scales where Galactic foreground contamination is the…
The study of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization is still in a pioneering stage, but promises to bring a huge advancement in cosmology in the near future, just as high-accuracy observations of the anisotropies in the total…
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) is an invaluable probe of the conditions of the early universe. Recent measurements of its spatial anisotropy have allowed accurate determinations of several fundamental cosmological…
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…
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…
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…
We summarize the physical mechanism by which the Cosmic Microwave Background acquires a small degree of polarization. We discuss the imprint left by gravitational waves and the use of polarization as a test of the inflationary paradigm. We…
Recent announcements that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) - the faint remnant of the Big Bang - is polarized have caused a stir among cosmologists. Such polarization has long been predicted but could not be detected, until the recent…
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…
The polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)is a powerful observational tool at hand for modern cosmology. It allows to break the degeneracy of fundamental cosmological parameters one cannot obtain using only anisotropy data…
The coming flood of CMB polarization experiments, spurred by the recent detection of CMB polarization by DASI and WMAP, will be confronted by many new analysis tasks specific to polarization. For the analysis of CMB polarization data sets,…
Polarimetry of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) represents one of the possible diagnostics aimed at testing large-scale magnetism at the epoch of the photon decoupling. The propagation of electromagnetic disturbances in a magnetized…
In forthcoming years, connections between cosmology and particle physics will be made increasingly important with the advent of a new generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Here, we review a number of these links. Our…
The polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation carries essential information on early stages of the Universe such as the cosmic inflation, forming cosmological structures through gravitational lensing, and the epoch of…
I describe briefly the Cosmic Microwave Background (hereafter CMB) physics which explains why high accuracy observations of its spatial structure are a unique observational tool both for the determination of the global cosmological…
The next generation of instruments designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will provide a historic opportunity to open the gravitational wave window to the primordial Universe. Through high sensitivity…
We have updated our analysis of the 9-year WMAP data using the collection of polarization maps looking for the presence of additional evidence for a finite 'cosmic ray foreground' for the CMB. We have given special attention to high…