Related papers: Minkowski Functional Description of Microwave Back…
The cosmic microwave background is now fulfilling its promise of determining the basic cosmological parameters describing our Universe. Future study of the microwave background will mostly be directed towards two basic questions: a complete…
Many statistical methods have been proposed in the last years for analyzing the spatial distribution of galaxies. Very few of them, however, can handle properly the border effects of complex observational sample volumes. In this paper, we…
The statistical properties of the temperature anisotropies and polarization of the of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation offer a powerful probe of the physics of the early universe. In recent works a statistical procedure based…
As a test of the standard inflationary cosmology, which generically predicts nearly scale-invariant spectrum of primordial curvature fluctuations, we perform Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo analysis to search for possible modulations in the power…
If the initial state of the inflaton field is taken to have a thermal distribution instead of the conventional zero particle vacuum state then the curvature power spectrum gets modified by a temperature dependent factor such that the…
Temperature maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, as those obtained by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), provide one of the most precise data sets to test fundamental hypotheses of modern cosmology. One of…
We aim to present a tutorial on the detection, parameter estimation and statistical analysis of compact sources (far galaxies, galaxy clusters and Galactic dense emission regions) in cosmic microwave background observations. The topic is of…
Tensor Minkowski Functionals (TMFs) are tensorial generalizations of the usual Minkowski Functionals which are scalar quantities. We introduce them here for use in cosmological analysis, in particular to analyze CMB maps. They encapsulate…
Current bounds from the polarization of the CMB predict the scale-invariant gravitational wave (GW) background of inflation to be out of reach for upcoming GW interferometers. This prospect dramatically changes if the inflaton is a…
We discuss the applicability and derivation of window functions for cosmic microwave background experiments on large and intermediate angular scales. These window functions describe the response of the experiment to power in a particular…
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…
In forthcoming years, connections between cosmology and particle physics will be made increasingly important with the advent of a new generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Here, we review a number of these links. Our…
In this paper, we focus our attention on the following question: How well can we recover the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from the maps of a given experiment?. Each experiment is described by a a pixelization scale, a…
In this thesis, we show how the structure of the landscape potential of the primordial Universe may be probed through the primordial density perturbations responsible for the origin of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies and the…
A simple method is presented for the rapid simulation of statistically-isotropic non-Gaussian maps of CMB temperature fluctuations with a given power spectrum and analytically-calculable bispectrum and higher-order polyspectra. The…
Phase transitions during inflation can generate a stochastic gravitational-wave background that probes primordial physics. We study the detectability and parameter reconstruction of such a signal with a space-based gravitational-wave…
We provide the gauge-invariant expression for large-scale cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations at second-order in perturbation theory. It enables to unambiguously define the nonlinearity parameter f_NL which is used by…
The Minkowski functionals are a mathematical tool to quantify morphological features of patterns. Some applications to the matter distribution in galaxy catalogues and N-body simulations are reviewed, with an emphasis on the effects of…
Oscillations in the frequency profile of the stochastic gravitational wave background are a characteristic prediction of small-scale features during inflation. In this paper we present a first investigation of the detection prospects of…
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…