Related papers: Igloo Pixelizations
The temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as measured today, may offer key insights into the topology of the early universe prior to inflation, for example, by discriminating between flat and warped…
Recent studies have found the earth's peculiar velocity to be significant in microwave background based tests for compact cosmic topology, and modifications to these tests have been proposed. Tests of non-gaussianity, weak lensing analysis…
The statistical analysis of the soon to come Planck satellite CMB data will help set tighter bounds on major cosmological parameters. On the way, a number of practical difficulties need to be tackled, notably that several other…
The Probe of Inflation and Cosmic Origins (PICO) is a probe-class mission concept currently under study by NASA. PICO will probe the physics of the Big Bang and the energy scale of inflation, constrain the sum of neutrino masses, measure…
We use a simple model to investigate the effect of polarized Galactic foreground emission on the ability of planned CMB missions to detect and model CMB polarization. Emission from likely polarized sources (synchrotron and spinning dust)…
The coming flood of CMB polarization experiments, spurred by the recent detection of CMB polarization by DASI and WMAP, will be confronted by many new analysis tasks specific to polarization. For the analysis of CMB polarization data sets,…
Microwave background polarization, though presently undetected, is a fundamental prediction of any viable cosmological model. These lectures review the theoretical description of polarization, its physical interpretation, and potentially…
Present cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations have significantly advanced our understanding of the universe's origin, especially with primordial gravitational waves (PGWs). Currently, ground-based CMB telescopes are mainly located…
The PLANCK satellite mission has been launched the 14th of May 2009 and is dedicated to the measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in temperature and polarization. The presence of diffuse galactic polarized emission…
Polarimetric observations of the twilight sky are effective for the investigations of scattering properties of the atmosphere at different altitudes. Modern computer technique allows to reduce the influence of multiple scattering on the…
We investigate the anisotropy in cosmic microwave background Planck maps due to the coupling between its beam asymmetry and uneven scanning strategy. Introducing a pixel space estimator based on the temperature gradients, we find a highly…
This paper presents the Planck 2015 likelihoods, statistical descriptions of the 2-point correlations of CMB data, using the hybrid approach employed previously: pixel-based at $\ell<30$ and a Gaussian approximation to the distribution of…
Polarization is the next frontier of CMB analysis, but its signal is dominated over much of the sky by foregrounds which must be carefully removed. To determine the efficacy of this cleaning it is necessary to have sensitive tests for…
The High Frequency Instrument of Planck will map the entire sky in the millimeter and sub-millimeter domain from 100 to 857 GHz with unprecedented sensitivity to polarization ($\Delta P/T_{\tiny cmb} \sim 4\cdot 10^{-6}$) at 100, 143, 217…
3D printing presents an attractive alternative to visual representation of physical datasets such as astronomical images that can be used for research, outreach or teaching purposes, and is especially relevant to people with a visual…
Spectral distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) offer the possibility of probing processes which occurred during the evolution of our Universe going back up to Z$\simeq 10^7$. Unfortunately all the attempts so far carried out…
Interstellar polarization from aligned dust grains can be measured both in transmission at visible and near-infrared wavelengths and in emission at far-infrared and sub-mm wavelengths. These observations can help predict the behavior of…
We describe an assembly of numerical tools to model the output data of the Planck satellite. These start with the generation of a CMB sky in a chosen cosmology, add in various foreground sources, convolve the sky signal with arbitrary, even…
The cosmic microwave background radiation defines a preferred cosmic rest frame, and inflationary cosmological theories predict that the microwave background temperature fluctuations should be statistically isotropic in this rest frame. For…
Cosmic Microwave Background experiments must achieve very accurate calibration of their polarization reference frame to avoid biasing the cosmological parameters. In particular, a wrong or inaccurate calibration might mimic the presence of…