Related papers: Temperature-Polarization Correlations from Tensor …
The anisotropy and polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) induced by the scalar and tensor metric perturbations are computed in the long-wavelength limit. It is found that the large-scale polarization of CMBR…
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…
These lecture notes cover mainly three connected topics. In the first part we give a detailed treatment of cosmological perturbation theory. The second part is devoted to cosmological inflation and the generation of primordial fluctuations.…
In this paper, inflationary cosmology is reviewed, paying particular attention to its observational signatures associated with large-scale density perturbations generated from quantum fluctuations. In the most general scalar-tensor theories…
If inflation was preceded by a radiation era then at the time of inflation there will exist a decoupled thermal distribution of gravitons. Gravitational waves generated during inflation will be amplified by the process of stimulated…
Future cosmic microwave background polarization experiments will search for evidence of primordial tensor modes at large angular scales, in the multipole range $4 \leq \ell \leq 50.$ Because in that range there is some mild evidence of…
The measurement of B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background at large angular scales by the BICEP experiment suggests a stochastic gravitational wave background from early-universe inflation with a surprisingly large amplitude.…
Probing correlations among short and long-wavelength cosmological fluctuations is known to be decisive for deepening the current understanding of inflation at the microphysical level. Spectral distortions of the CMB can be caused by…
Recently, BICEP2 measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) $B$-mode polarization at degree angular scales has indicated the presence of tensor modes with a high tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r=0.2$ when assuming nearly…
Full-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background temperature reveal a 7% asymmetry of fluctuation power between two halves of the sky. A common phenomenological model for this asymmetry is an overall dipole modulation of statistically…
The theoretical basis for the prediction of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background is very well developed. Very low amplitude density and temperature perturbations produce small gravitational effects, leading to an anisotropy that…
We study the effect of a finite topology on the temperature correlations of the cosmic microwave background in a flat universe. Analytic expressions for the angular power spectrum are given for all possible finite flat models. We examine…
In standard inflationary cosmology, scalar and tensor perturbations grew as the Universe expanded and froze when their wavelengths exceeded the Hubble horizon, producing a tell-tale signature in the fluctuation spectrum and amplitude of the…
We compute the polarization power spectra for global strings, monopoles, textures and nontopological textures, and compare them to inflationary models. We find that topological defect models predict a significant (1 microK) contribution to…
We show that inflationary models with broken rotational invariance generate testable off-diagonal signatures in the correlation between the $\mu$-type distortion and temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. More…
We review the prospects for detecting tensor modes generated during inflation by CMB polarization experiments and by searching for a stochastic gravitational wave background with laser interferometers in space. We tackle the following two…
If during inflation the inflaton couples to a "fossil" field, some new scalar, vector, or tensor field, it typically induces a scalar-scalar-fossil bispectrum. Even if the fossil field leaves no direct physical trace after inflation, it…
We show that in theories with a nontrivial kinetic term the contribution of the gravitational waves to the CMB fluctuations can be substantially larger than that is naively expected in simple inflationary models. This increase of the…
The angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropy observed by WMAP has an anomalous dip at l~20 and bump at l~40. One explanation for this structure is the presence of features in the primordial curvature…
We develop an analytic method and approximations to compute the polarization induced in the cosmic microwave background radiation on a wide range of angular scales by anisotropic Thomson scattering in presence of adiabatic scalar…