Simulated observations of a 10 • × 10 • field by the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) are analysed in order to separate cosmic microwave background (CMB) emission from foreground contaminants and instrumental noise and thereby determine how accurately the CMB emission can be recovered. The simulations include emission from the CMB, the kinetic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects from ga...

We perform a multiparameter likelihood analysis to compare measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectra with predictions from models involving cosmic strings. Adding strings to the standard case of a primordial spectrum with power-law tilt ns, we find a 2sigma detection of strings: f10=0.11+/-0.05, where f10 is the fractional contribution made by strings in the temperatur...

The atomic recombination process leads to a softening of the matter equation of state as reflected by a reduced generalized adiabatic index, with accompanying heat release. We study the effects of this recombination softening and reheating of the cosmic plasma on the ionization history, visibility function, Cold Dark Matter (CDM) transfer function, and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spec...

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a precious window on fundamental physics at very high energy scales, possibly including quantum gravity, GUTs and supersymmetry. The CMB has already enabled defect-based rivals to inflation to be discarded, and will be able to falsify many inflationary models. In combination with other cosmological observations, including those of high-redshift sup...

In this note, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation is shown to be capable of functioning as a Random Bit Generator, and constitutes an effectively infinite supply of truly random one-time pad values of arbitrary length. It is further argued that the CMB power spectrum potentially conforms to the FIPS 140-2 standard. Additionally, its applicability to the generation of a (n × n) rando...

We study the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy in the scenario where the baryon asymmetry of the universe is generated from a condensation of a scalar field. In such a scenario, the scalar condensation may acquire fluctuation during the inflation which becomes a new source of the cosmic density perturbations. In particular, the primordial fluctuation of the scalar condensation may in...

Using spin-weighted decomposition of polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) we show that a particular combination of Stokes Q and U parameters vanishes for primordial fluctuations generated by scalar modes, but does not for those generated by primordial gravity waves. Because of this gravity wave detection is not limited by cosmic variance as in the case of temperature fluctuatio...

The effect of gravitational lensing on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies is investigated using the power spectrum approach. The lensing effect can be calculated in any cosmological model by specifying the evolution of gravitational potential. Previous work on this subject is generalized to a non-flat universe and to a nonlinear evolution regime. Gravitational lensing cannot change ...

We calculate the angular power spectrum of the galactic synchrotron radiation induced by the small scale fluctuations of the magnetic field and the cosmic ray electron density. Using the observed interstellar magnetic field spectrum, which is consistent with the Komolgorov turbulence model at the relevant scales, we find that Cl ∝ l−3.7. We estimate the cosmic ray electron density fluctuation s...

During recent years it has become clear that global O(N) defects and U(1) cosmic strings do not lead to the pronounced first acoustic peak in the power spectrum of anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background ~CMB! which has recently been observed to high accuracy. Inflationary models cannot easily accommodate the low second peak indicated by the data. Here we construct causal scaling seed m...