Related papers: Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies and extra…

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…

The intersection of string theory with cosmology is unavoidable in the early universe, and its exploration may shine light on both fields. In this thesis, three papers at this intersection are presented and reviewed, with the aim of…

We use weighted mean and median statistics techniques to combine individual cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy detections and determine binned, multipole-space, CMB anisotropy power spectra. The resultant power spectra are peaked.…

The blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73K Cosmic Microwave Background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the…

Using an analytical model for the string network we show that the kurtosis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature gradient maps is a good statistic to distinguish between the cosmic string model and inflationary models of…

An introduction to topological defects in cosmology is given. We discuss their possible relevance for structure formation. Especial emphasis is given on the signature of topological defects in the spectrum of anisotropies in the cosmic…

Because cosmic superstrings generically form junctions and gauge theoretic strings typically do not, junctions may provide a signature to distinguish between cosmic superstrings and gauge theoretic cosmic strings. In cosmic microwave…

We investigate cosmologies where the accelerated expansion of the Universe is driven by a field with an anisotropic equation of state. We model such scenarios within the Bianchi I framework, introducing two skewness parameters to quantify…

If the Universe underwent a cosmic phase transition, it may have left behind a network of cosmic strings. When these strings arise from the breaking of a gauge symmetry, their decay produces a significant stochastic background of…

The anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are computed for the half-turn space E_2 which represents a compact flat model of the Universe, i.e. one with finite volume. This model is inhomogeneous in the sense that the…

The properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation provide unique constraints on cosmological models, i.e. on the content, history, and evolution of the Universe. I discuss the latest measurements of the spectral and spatial…

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) encodes information on the origin and evolution of the universe, buried in a fractional anisotropy of one part in 100,000 on angular scales from arcminutes to tens of degrees. We await the coming…

Observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), especially of its frequency spectrum and its anisotropies, both in temperature and in polarization, have played a key role in the development of modern cosmology and our understanding…

Recent high precision measurements of the CMB anisotropies performed by the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1 experiments provide an unmatched set of data allowing to probe different cosmological models. Among these scenarios, motivated by the recent…

A new method arising from a gauge-theoretic approach to general relativity is applied to the formation of clusters in an expanding universe. The three cosmological models (Omega_0=1, Omega_Lambda=0), (Omega_0=0.3, Omega_Lambda=0.7),…

We study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies produced by cosine-type quintessence models. In our analysis, effects of the adiabatic and isocurvature fluctuations are both taken into account. For purely adiabatic fluctuations…

I consider the case of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from one single ordered perturbation source, or seed, existing well before decoupling between matter and radiation. Such structures could have been left by high…

In the standard cosmological model, the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background is interpreted as variation in the gravitational potential at the point of emission, due to the emitter being embedded in a region ${\cal C}$…

We perform a detailed comparison of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy with the predictions of quintessence cosmological models of…

We introduce a simple yet powerful {\it analytic} method which obtains the structure of cosmic microwave background anisotropies to better than 5-10\% in temperature fluctuations on {\it all} scales. It is applicable to {\it any} model in…