Related papers: Mapping the ionizing sources with CMB polarization…
The Planck satellite experiment, which was launched the 14th of may 2009, will give an accurate measurement of the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in temperature and polarization. This measurement is polluted by the…
In this paper, we discuss why and how the Planck mission, originally designed and proposed for mapping CMB intensity fluctuations, has been revised for polarisation measurement capability as well.
Matter inhomogeneities along the line of sight deflect the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons originating at the last scattering surface at redshift $z \sim 1100$. These distortions modify the pattern of CMB polarization. We identify…
(abridged) We study the impact of the large-angle CMB polarization datasets publicly released by the WMAP and Planck satellites on the estimation of cosmological parameters of the $\Lambda$CDM model. To complement large-angle polarization,…
Dark matter energy injection in the early universe modifies both the ionization history and the temperature of the intergalactic medium. In this work, we improve the CMB bounds on sub-keV dark matter and extend previous bounds from…
Neutral hydrogen around high-z QSO and an optical depth tau ~ 0.17 can be reconciled if reionization is more complex than a single transition at z ~ 6-8. Tracing its details could shed a new light on the first sources of radiation. Here we…
The epoch of reionization is a milestone of cosmological structure formation, marking the birth of the first objects massive enough to yield large numbers of ionizing photons. The mechanism and timescale of reionization remain largely…
We investigate the tolerance for systematic errors in lensing analysis applied to a patchwork map of Cosmic Microwave Background polarization. We focus on the properties of the individual polarization maps that comprise the patchwork and…
We examine the constraints on high-redshift star formation, ultraviolet and X-ray pre-ionization, and the epoch of reionization at redshift z_r, inferred from the recent WMAP-5 measurement, tau_e = 0.084 +/- 0.016, of the electron…
Current data of high-redshift absorption-line systems imply that hydrogen reionization occurred before redshifts of about 5. Previous works on reionization by the first stars or quasars have shown that such scenarios are described by a…
One of the main goals of modern cosmic microwave background (CMB) missions is to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ accurately to constrain inflation models. Due to ignorance about the reionization history $X_{e}(z)$, this analysis is…
Using a Bayesian framework, we quantify what current observations imply about the history of the epoch of reionisation (EoR). We use a popular, three-parameter EoR model, flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of physically-plausible…
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…
We present constraints on the reionization optical depth, $\tau$, obtained using several independent methods. First, we perform a non-parametric reconstruction of the reionization history, using Lyman-$\alpha$ constraints on the evolution…
The Planck experiment has measured the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) angular spectrum with unprecedented accuracy, and these results are likely to remain the state-of-the art for a decade or more. Since these measurements are going to…
The injection of secondary particles produced by Dark Matter (DM) annihilation around redshift 1000 would inevitably affect the process of recombination, leaving an imprint on Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies and polarization.…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, such as WMAP and Planck, measure intensity anisotropies and build maps using a linearized formula for relating them to the temperature blackbody fluctuations. However, this procedure also…
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…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies have turned out to represent one of the most stringent 'bottle necks' for scenarios of large scale structure formation. As a possibility to relax this constraint, it has been proposed that…
We study constraints on allowed reionization histories by comparing predictions of a physical semi-numerical model with secondary temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Our model has four free…