Related papers: Introduction to Microwave Background Polarization
We describe the design and performance of a microwave polarimeter used to make precision measurements of polarized astrophysical radiation in three microwave frequency bands spanning 26-36 GHz. The instrument uses cooled HEMT amplifiers in…
This lecture is a sketch of the physics of the cosmic microwave background. The observed anisotropy can be divided into four main contributions: variations in the temperature and gravitational potential of the primordial plasma, Doppler…
Temperature and polarization power spectra of the cosmic microwave background can provide essentially incontrovertible evidence for coherent acoustic oscillations in the early universe. A simple model calculation demonstrates explicitly how…
We study the detectability of circular polarization in a stochastic gravitational wave background from various sources such as supermassive black hole binaries, cosmic strings, and inflation in the early universe with pulsar timing arrays.…
Most of the cosmological information extracted from the CMB has been obtained through the power spectrum, however there is much more to be learnt from the statistical distribution of the temperature random field. We review some recent…
Prior to photon decoupling magnetic random fields of comoving intensity in the nano-Gauss range distort the temperature and the polarization anisotropies of the microwave background, potentially induce a peculiar B-mode power spectrum and…
I give a status report and outlook concerning the use of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies to constrain the inflationary cosmology, and stress its crucial role as an underlying paradigm for the estimation of cosmological…
Several of the current and next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments have polarimetric capability, promising to add to the finesse of precision cosmology. One of the contaminating Galactic foregrounds is thermal emission…
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…
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…
The potential role of cosmic topological defects has raised interest in the astrophysical community for many years now. In this set of notes, we give an introduction to the subject of cosmic topological defects and some of their possible…
Microwave background temperature and polarization observations are a powerful way to constrain cosmological parameters if the likelihood function can be calculated accurately. The temperature and polarization fields are correlated, partial…
We estimate the accuracy with which various cosmological parameters can be determined from the CMB temperature and polarization data when various galactic unpolarized and polarized foregrounds are included and marginalized using the…
I explain the origin and evolution of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and argue that upcoming experiments will measure cosmological and fundamental parameters very accurately. Most of the paper focuses on present data,…
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…
Using the formalism of spin-weighted functions we present an all-sky analysis of polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Linear polarization is a second-rank symmetric and traceless tensor, which can be decomposed on a sphere…
Science opportunities and recommendations concerning optical/infrared polarimetry for the upcoming decade in the field of cosmology. Community-based White Paper to Astro2010 in response to the call for such papers.
Statistically anomalous signals in the microwave background have been extensively studied in general in multipole space, and in real space mainly for circular and other simple patterns. In this paper we search for a range of non-trivial…
We show that significant anisotropy in electromagnetic propagation generates a distinctive signature in the microwave background. The anisotropy may be determined by looking at the cross correlator of the $E$-mode and $B$-mode polarisation…
The polarization of the CMBR represents a powerful test for modern cosmology. It allows to break the degeneracy of fundamental cosmological parameters, and also to observe the contribution of gravitational waves background to the CMBR…