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The cosmic microwave background (CMB) traveled the cosmos long before it reached our telescopes today. Consequently, it is one of the best probes of fundamental processes in the early Universe that we could hope to observe. The cosmological…

The circular polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is usually taken to be zero since it is not generated by Thomson scattering. Here we explore the actual level of circular polarization in the CMB generated by conventional…

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…

In this paper, we review the approach leading to cosmic polarization rotation observation and present the current status with an outlook. In the study of the relations among equivalence principles, we found that long-range…

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…

We present a framework for the optimal filtering of spherical signals contaminated by realizations of an additive, zero-mean, uncorrelated and anisotropic noise process on the sphere. Filtering is performed in the wavelet domain given by…

Gravitons are the quantum counterparts of gravitational waves in low-energy theories of gravity. Using Feynman rules one can compute scattering amplitudes describing the interaction between gravitons and other fields. Here, we consider the…

If the Universe has non-trivial spatial topology, observables depend on both the parameters of the spatial manifold and the position and orientation of the observer. In infinite Euclidean space, most cosmological observables arise from the…

In order to quantitatively test the ability of averaged inhomogeneous cosmologies to correctly describe observations of the large scale properties of the Universe, we introduce a smoothed template metric corresponding to a constant spatial…

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…

Scalar wavelets have been used extensively in the analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature maps. Spin needlets are a new form of (spin) wavelets which were introduced in the mathematical literature by Geller and Marinucci…

In this thesis we investigate several aspects related to the theory of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We develop a new algorithm to calculate the angular power spectrum of the anisotropies which is two orders of magnitude…

The atmospheres of planets (including Earth) and the outer layers of stars have often been treated in radiative transfer as plane-parallel media, instead of spherical shells, which can lead to inaccuracy, e.g. limb darkening. We give an…

In addition to shear and vorticity a homogeneous background may also exhibit anisotropic curvature. Here a class of spacetimes is shown to exist where the anisotropy is solely of the latter type, and the shear-free condition is supported by…

We investigate the use of wavelet transforms in detecting and characterising non-Gaussian structure in maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We apply the method to simulated maps of the Kaiser-Stebbins effect due to cosmic strings…

We review the theory of the temperature anisotropy and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and describe what we have learned from current CMB observations. In particular, we discuss how the CMB is being used to…

We review the present status of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy observations and discuss the main related astrophysical issues, instrumental effects and data analysis techniques. We summarise the balloon-borne and ground-based…

Modern cosmology rests on the working assumption that the Universe is isotropic and homogeneous at large scales. Here, we document a number of anomalous observations pointing to an anisotropic Universe in a direction consistent with the CMB…

Forthcoming cosmic microwave background experiments (CMB) will provide precise new tests of structure-formation theories. The geometry of the Universe may be determined robustly, and the classical cosmological parameters, such as the…

The anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background are a gold mine for cosmology and fundamental physics. ESA's Planck satellite should soon extract all information from the temperature vein but will be limited concerning the measurement…