Related papers: Cosmic Microwave Background experiments targeting …
We discuss a new test of inflation from the harmonic pattern of peaks in the cosmic microwave background radiation angular power spectrum. By characterizing the features of alternate models and revealing signatures essentially unique to…
Much recent work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has focussed on the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies and particularly on the recovery of cosmological parameters from acoustic peaks in the power spectrum. However,…
We review the currrent cosmic parameter determinations of relevance to inflation using the WMAP-1year, Boomerang, CBI, Acbar and other CMB data. The basic steps in the pipelines which determine the bandpowers from the raw data from which…
Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation by the Boomerang experiment indicate that the universe is spatially flat. Here some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations are used to explain their result. The main result…
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…
We show that the existence of cosmic strings can be strongly constrained by the next generation of gravitational lensing surveys at radio frequencies. We focus on cosmic string loops, which simulations suggest would be far more numerous…
The Doppler peaks (Sacharov peaks) in the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, are mainly due to coherent oscillations in the baryon radiation plasma before recombination. Here we present a calculation of…
We study the deflection of light in the background of a "wiggly" cosmic string, and investigate whether it is possible to detect cosmic strings by means of weak gravitational lensing. For straight strings without small-scale structure there…
One of the most interesting predictions of string-inspired cosmological models is the presence of a stochastic background of relic gravitational waves in the frequency band accessible to Earth-based detectors. Here we consider a ``minimal''…
This paper presents a measurement of the angular power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background from l=75 to l=1025 (~10' to 5 degrees) from a combined analysis of four 150 GHz channels in the BOOMERANG experiment. The spectrum contains…
Many analyses of microwave background experiments neglect the correlation of noise in different frequency or polarization channels. We show that these correlations, should they be present, can lead to severe misinterpretation of an…
We describe a new code to search for signatures of cosmic strings in cosmic microwave anisotropy maps. The code implements the Canny Algorithm, an edge detection algorithm designed to search for the lines of large gradients in maps. Such a…
We investigate the effect of wiggly cosmic strings on the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy and matter power spectrum by modifying the string network model used by Albrecht et al.. We employ the wiggly equation of state for…
The spectrum and statistics of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) are investigated under the hypothesis that scale invariance of the primordial density fluctuations should be promoted to full conformal invariance. As in the…
With polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now detected, and confirmed by several independent experiments, the next goal is to characterise accurately its statistical properties. In these lecture notes we review the physical…
There exists various proposals to detect cosmic strings from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) or 21 cm temperature maps. Current proposals do not aim to find the location of strings on sky maps, all of these approaches can be thought of as…
We present the first ever calculation of cosmic microwave background CMB anisotropy power spectra from semilocal cosmic strings, obtained via simulations of a classical field theory. Semilocal strings are a type of non-topological defect…
We study the uniqueness and robustness of acoustic signatures in the cosmic microwave background by allowing for the possibility that they are generated by some as yet unknown source of gravitational perturbations. The acoustic {\it…
The recent claim by BICEP2 of evidence for primordial gravitational waves from inflation has focused interest on the potential for early-Universe cosmology using observations of gravitational waves. In addition to cosmic microwave…
The increasing precision of cosmological datasets is opening up new opportunities to test predictions from cosmic inflation. Here we study the impact of high precision constraints on the primordial power spectrum and show how a new…