Related papers: Is Cosmic Parity Violation Responsible for the Ano…
The WMAP and Planck observations show that the quadrupole and octopole orientations of the CMB might align with each other. We reveal that the quadrupole--octopole alignment is a natural implication of the primordial power spectrum in an…
In this communication, we consider a wide class of extensions to General Relativity that break explicitly the Einstein Equivalence Principle by introducing a multiplicative coupling between a scalar field and the electromagnetic Lagrangian.…
Recent Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data confirm the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) quadrupole anomaly. We further elaborate our previous proposal that the quadrupole power can be naturally suppressed in axis-symmetric…
We confront predictions of inflationary scenarios with the WMAP data, in combination with complementary small-scale CMB measurements and large-scale structure data. The WMAP detection of a large-angle anti-correlation in the…
We put forward the conjecture that all CP violating phenomena may have a common origin. In order to illustrate our idea, we present a minimal model where CP is spontaneously broken at a high energy scale, through the phase in the vacuum…
Flavor effects due to lepton interactions in the early Universe may have played an important role in the generation of the cosmological baryon asymmetry through leptogenesis. If the only source of high-energy CP violation comes from the…
We consider a cosmology in which a spherically symmetric large scale inhomogeneous enhancement or a void are described by an inhomogeneous metric and Einstein's gravitational equations. For a flat matter dominated universe the inhomogeneous…
Contaldi et al. [1] have suggested that an initial period of kinetic energy domination in single field inflation may explain the lack of CMB power at large angular scales. We note that in this situation it is natural that there also be a…
Parity violation in the early universe holds great promise for uncovering new physics. In particular, the primordial scalar four-point correlation function is allowed to develop a parity-violating component when massive spinning particles…
We revisit the alignments of the largest structures observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the seven and nine-year WMAP and first-year Planck data releases. The observed alignments -- the quadrupole with the octopole and…
We study the effect of a violation of the strong equivalence principle (SEP) on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Such a violation would modify the weight of baryons in the primordial gravitational potentials and hence their impact in…
The B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a unique window into tensor perturbations from inflationary gravitational waves. Survey effects complicate the estimation and description of the power spectrum on the…
A possible origin of the anomalous dip and bump in the primordial power spectrum, which are reconstructed from WMAP data corresponding to the multipole $\ell=100\sim 140$ by using the inversion method, is investigated as a consequence of…
The origin of parity violation in physics is still unknown. At the present time, it is introduced in the theory by requiring that the SU(2) subgroup entering the description of interactions involves the left components. In the present…
Could new physics break the mirror symmetry of the Universe? Utilizing recent measurements of the parity-odd four-point correlation function of BOSS galaxies, we probe the physics of inflation by placing constraints on the amplitude of a…
Measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum, or three-point correlation function, has now become one of the principle efforts in early-Universe cosmology. Here we show that there is a odd-parity component of the CMB…
Most treatments of large scale anomalies in the microwave sky are a posteriori, with unquantified look-elsewhere effects. We contrast these with physical models of specific inhomogeneities in the early universe which then generate apparent…
Cosmic acceleration is explained quantitatively, purely in general relativity, as an apparent effect due to quasilocal gravitational energy differences that arise in the decoupling of bound systems from the global expansion of the universe.…
A Nordtvedt effect at cosmological scales affects the acoustic oscillations imprinted in the cosmic microwave background. The gravitational baryonic mass density of the universe is inferred at the first peak scale from WMAP data. The…
We overview the dark parity violation, which means the parity violation induced by a dark gauge boson of very small mass and coupling. When a dark gauge boson has an axial coupling, as in dark Z model, it can change the effective Weinberg…