Related papers: The Cosmic Background Radiation, Snowmass Workshop
Departures of the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from a perfect blackbody probe a fundamental property of the universe -- its thermal history. Current upper limits, dating back some 25 years, limit such spectral…
The ten's of micro-Kelvin variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation across the sky encode a wealth of information about the Universe. The full-sky, high-resolution maps of the CMB that will be made in…
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…
The temperature anisotropies and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a window back to the physics of the early universe. They encode the nature of the initial fluctuations and so can reveal much about the…
We question the global universe isotropy by probing the alignment of local structures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The original method proposed relies on a steerable wavelet decomposition of the CMB signal on the…
If the first stars formed soon after decoupling of baryons from the thermal cosmic background radiation (CBR), the radiation may have been last scattered in a cloudy plasma. We discuss the resulting small-scale anisotropy of the CBR in the…
This is a solicited whitepaper for the Snowmass 2021 community planning exercise. The paper focuses on measurements and science with the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The CMB is foundational to our understanding of modern physics and…
We review the physical processes that are thought to produce anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background, focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on the effects of acoustic waves in the early Universe. We attempt throughout to supply an…
In this talk, I will illustrate how one can use the cosmic microwave background anisotropy measurements, in order to test theoretical models aiming at describing the early universe.
This article is a written and modified version of a talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Venice, Italy, in August 2007. The talk focuses on some of the cosmology history leading to the discovery and…
As the era of high precision cosmology approaches, the empirically determined power spectrum of the microwave background anisotropy, $C_l$, will provide a crucial test for cosmological theories. We present a unified semi-analytic framework…
We have investigated the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy in closed multiply connected universes (flat and hyperbolic) with low matter density. We show that the COBE constraints on these low matter density models with…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and density fluctuations are calculated for flat cold dark matter (CDM) models with a wide range of parameters, i.e., $\Omega_0, h$ and $\Omega_B$ for both standard recombination and various…
We develop and examine the principles governing the formation of distortions in the cosmic microwave background. Distortions in the frequency or spectral distribution of the background probe the thermal history of the universe whereas those…
In addition to its spectrum and temperature anisotropy, the 2.7K Cosmic Microwave Background is also expected to exhibit a low level of polarization. The spatial power spectrum of the polarization can provide details about the formation of…
Since the measurements of COBE/FIRAS in the mid-90's we know that the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is extremely close to that of a perfect blackbody at an average temperature T0~2.726K. However, a number of…
The cosmic microwave background anisotropy is sensitive to the slope and amplitude of primordial energy density and gravitational wave fluctuations, the baryon density, the Hubble constant, the cosmological constant, the ionization history,…
This is the obligatory Cosmic Microwave Background review. I discuss the current status of CMB anisotropies, together with some points on the related topic of the Far-Infrared Background. We have already learned a number of important things…
The COBE satellite has provided the only comprehensive multi-frequency full-sky observations of the microwave sky available today. Assessment of the observations requires a detailed likelihood analysis to extract the maximum amount of…
Recently high quality data of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies have been published. In this work we study to which extent the cosmological parameters determined by using this data depend on assumptions about the initial…