Related papers: CMB Optical Depth Measurements: Past, Present, Fut…
The free-electron population during the reionized epoch rescatters CMB temperature quadrupole and generates a now well-known polarization signal at large angular scales. While this contribution has been detected in the…
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…
Observational Cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in recent years. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more…
Since the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in 1965, characterization of the CMB anisotropy angular power spectrum has become somewhat of a holy grail for experimental cosmology. Because CMB anisotropy measurements are…
The scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in galaxy clusters induces polarization signals according to the quadrupole anisotropy in the photon distribution at the cluster location. This `remote quadrupole' derived from…
Cosmology requires new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles and fields. What is the fundamental physics behind dark matter and dark energy? What generated the initial fluctuations in the early Universe? Polarised light…
The last years have been an exciting period for the field of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) research. With recent CMB balloon-borne and ground-based experiments we are entering a new era of 'precision' cosmology that enables us to…
We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) gravitational lensing potential using data from the first two seasons of observations with SPTpol, the polarization-sensitive receiver currently installed on the South Pole…
The Planck experiment will soon provide a very accurate measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies. This will let cosmologists determine most of the cosmological parameters with unprecedented accuracy. Future experiments will…
We quantify the limiting factors in optimizing current-technology cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiments in order to learn about inflationary physics. We consider space-based, balloon-borne and ground-based experiments.…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role in cosmology. Besides precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model, observations have also established…
A great deal of experimental effort is currently being devoted to the precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky in temperature and polarisation. Satellites, balloon-borne, and ground-based experiments scrutinize the…
In this talk, I review some recent work on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in an open universe. I emphasize that the observed CMB anisotropies are still consistent with a low value of $\Omega$, and I address the question of…
The primordial B-modes component of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization is a promising experimental dataset to probe the inflationary paradigm. B-modes are indeed a direct consequence of the presence of gravitational waves in…
The temperature and polarization inhomogeneities of the Cosmic Microwave Background might bear the mark of pre-decoupling magnetism. The parameters of a putative magnetized background are hereby estimated from the observed temperature…
[Abridged] The polarization of the CMB is widely recognized as a potential source of information about primordial gravitational waves. The gravitational wave contribution can be separated from the dominant CMB polarization created by…
We present a search for axion-like polarization oscillations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with observations from the Keck Array. A local axion field induces an all-sky, temporally sinusoidal rotation of CMB polarization. A CMB…
Cosmological Birefringence (CB), a rotation of the polarization plane of radiation coming to us from distant astrophysical sources, may reveal parity violation in either the electromagnetic or gravitational sectors of the fundamental…
We discuss a possibility to directly reconstruct the CMB polarization field at the last scattering surface by accounting for modifications imposed by the gravitational lensing effect. The suggested method requires a tracer field of the…
Measurements of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation are expected to significantly increase our understanding of the early universe. We present a design for a CMB polarimeter in which a cryogenically cooled…