Related papers: Cosmological Birefringence and the Microwave Backg…

A medium with specific anisotropic refractive indices can induce a supersymmetric behavior in the propagation of polarized electromagnetic waves, in an analogue fashion to a quantum mechanical system. The polarizations of the wave are the…

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.

We examine the degree to which observations of large-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization can shed light on the puzzling large-scale power modulation in maps of CMB anisotropy. We consider a phenomenological model in which…

Much recent work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has focussed on the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies and particularly on the recovery of cosmological parameters from acoustic peaks in the power spectrum. However,…

Rapid progress has been made in observations of the temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). These observations have enabled cosmologists to characterize the state of the universe at recombination, and…

The spectral variation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by WMAP was tested using foreground reduced WMAP5 data, by producing subtraction maps at the 1$^\circ$ angular resolution between the two cosmological bands of V…

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…

Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) 3-year data confirm the ellipticity of anisotropies of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps, found previously for Boomerang and WMAP 1-year high sensitivity maps. The low noise level of the WMAP…

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…

Polarization observations of the cosmic microwave background with the Cosmic Background Imager from September 2002 to May 2004 provide a significant detection of the E-mode polarization and reveal an angular power spectrum of polarized…

We discuss fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization due to scattering from reionized gas at low redshifts. Polarization is produced by re-scattering of the primordial temperature anisotropy quadrupole and of the…

The COBE satellite has discovered anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) consistent with a scale invariant spectrum of density perturbations. As reviewed in this lecture, topological defect models of structure formation…

Even in the absence of a sizable tensor contribution, a B-mode polarization can be generated because of the competition between a pseudo-scalar background and pre-decoupling magnetic fields. By investigating the dispersion relations of a…

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…

We compute the spectral distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization induced by non-linear effects in the Compton interactions between CMB photons and cold intergalactic electrons. This signal is of the $y$-type and is…

A recent study of the rotation of the plane of polarization of light from 160 cosmological sources claims to find significant evidence for cosmological anisotropy. We point out methodological weaknesses of that study, and reanalyze the same…

We review the methods used to test for the existence of cosmological birefringence, i.e. a rotation of the plane of linear polarization for electromagnetic radiation traveling over cosmological distances, which might arise in a number of…

This article describes the computation of cosmic microwave background anisotropies in a universe with multi-connected spatial sections and focuses on the implementation of the topology in standard CMB computer codes. The key ingredient is…

We estimate the contribution of extragalactic radio sources to fluctuations in sky temperature over the range of frequencies (10-300 GHz) used for Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy measurements. CMB anisotropy observations at…

Pulsar-timing collaborations have recently reported evidence for the detection of an isotropic stochastic gravitational-wave background consistent with one sourced by a population of inspiralling supermassive black hole binaries. However, a…