Related papers: Constraining fundamental physics with the cosmic m…
We intend to show how fundamental science is drawn from the patterns in the temperature and polarization fields of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and thus to motivate the field of CMB research. We discuss the field's…
One of the most spectacular scientific breakthroughs in past decades was using measurements of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to test precisely our understanding of the history and composition of the Universe.…
I consider the case of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from one single ordered perturbation source, or seed, existing well before decoupling between matter and radiation. Such structures could have been left by high…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a precious window on fundamental physics at very high energy scales, possibly including quantum gravity, GUTs and supersymmetry. The CMB has already enabled defect-based rivals to inflation to…
Fluctuations in the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe each contain clues about the nature of the earliest moments of time. The next generation of…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
The fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are investigated for a small open universe, i.e., one which is periodically composed of a small fundamental cell. The evolution of initial metric perturbations is computed using the…
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…
Following the pioneering observations with COBE in the early 1990s, studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have focused on temperature and polarization anisotropies. CMB spectral distortions - tiny departures of the CMB energy…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies probe the primordial density field at the edge of the observable Universe. There is a limiting precision (``cosmic variance'') with which anisotropies can determine the amplitude of primordial…
Phase transitions in the early universe can readily create an observable stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that such a background necessarily contains anisotropies analogous to those of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
Temperature and polarization variations across the microwave sky include the fingerprints of quantum fluctuations in the early universe. They may soon reveal physics at unprecedented energy scales.
The observed structures in the universe are thought to have arisen from gravitational instability acting on small fluctuations generated in the early universe. These spatial fluctuations are imprinted on the CMBR as angular anisotropies.…
Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature are being studied with ever increasing precision. Two competing types of theories might describe the origins of these fluctuations: ``inflation'' and ``defects''. Here we…
In the first part of this work, I review the theoretical framework of cosmological perturbation theory necessary to understand the generation and evolution of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. Using analytical and numerical…
Rapid progress has been made in observations of the temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). These observations have enabled cosmologists to characterize the state of the universe at recombination, and…
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…
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…
These lecture notes comprise an informal but pedagogical introduction to the well established physics and phenomenology of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) between big bang nucleosynthesis and recombination. The dominant properties of…
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…