Related papers: Cosmic Background Radiation Polarization Experimen…
Charged cosmic rays have been measured up to macroscopic energies. Concerning neutrinos, the detection is still limited to terrestrial ones (apart from supernova production). A new way to search for extragalactic neutrinos is discussed.
With the increasing number of experiments dedicated to the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background, interest on the detailed properties of the foreground Galactic emission has risen. In particular the focus is shifting towards…
Polarizations of electromagnetic waves from distant galaxies are known to be correlated with the source orientations. These quantities have been used to search for signals of cosmological birefringence. We review and classify transformation…
We review evidence for a new phenomenon in the propagation of radio waves across the Universe, an anisotropic rotation of the plane of polarization not accounted for by conventional physics.
It has been recently argued that higher dimensional gravity theories may manifest themselves not only at short microscopic distances but also at large cosmological scales. We study the constraints that cosmic microwave background…
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…
Radio sources are often polarized. Accurate measurement of simply the flux density of a radio source requires a basic understanding of polarization and its measurement techniques. We provide an introductory, heuristic discussion of these…
PolarLight is a space-borne X-ray polarimeter that measures the X-ray polarization via electron tracking in an ionization chamber. It is a collimated instrument and thus suffers from the background on the whole detector plane. The majority…
The cosmic optical background is an important observable that constrains energy production in stars and more exotic physical processes in the universe, and provides a crucial cosmological benchmark against which to judge theories of…
Polarization is one of the fundamental natures of electromagnetic radiation. The detection of polarization or polarized photons from distant X-ray radiating systems (such as X-ray binaries (XBs), active galactic nuclei (AGN), pulsars, and…
The use of polarimetric techniques is nowadays widespread among solar and stellar astronomers. However, notwithstanding the recommandations that have often been made about the publication of polarimetric results in the astronomical…
Measuring the unknown neutrino oscillation parameters is one of the main aims in neutrino physics today. The measurement of these parameters is severely affected by the presence of degeneracies in the parameter space. Various neutrino…
We study gravitational lensing of the cosmic neutrino background. This signal is undetectable for the foreseeable future, but there is a rich trove of information available. At least some of the neutrinos from the early universe will be…
The polarisation properties of the intrinsically small (< 20 kpc) radio sources are briefly discussed. At centimetric and decimetric wavelengths, substantial polarised emission is often detected in quasars and, at a lower level, in radio…
This is a complete re-write of the mini-review for the Review of Particle Physics (a.k.a the Partcicle Data Book), which includes an assessment of the CMB anisotropy results and their interpretation up until the end of 2003. It forms a…
We quantify the level of polarization of the atmosphere due to Zeeman splitting of oxygen in the Earth's magnetic field and compare it to the level of polarization expected from the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation.…
The full sky cosmic microwave background polarization field can be decomposed into `electric' and `magnetic' components. Working in harmonic space we construct magnetic variables that can be measured from observations over only a portion of…
Astrophysical observations are a powerful tool to constrain effects of Lorentz-invariance violation in the photon sector. Objects at high redshifts provide the longest possible baselines, and gamma-ray telescopes allow us to observe some of…
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a unique opportunity for a direct study of the primordial cosmic plasma at redshift z ~1000. The angular power spectra of temperature and polarisation fluctuations are…
Recent theoretical and experimental studies have given raise to new aspects in quantum measurements and error-disturbance uncertainty relations. After a brief review of these issues, we present an experimental test of the error-disturbance…