By decomposing the damping tail of CMB anisotropies into a series of transfer functions representing individual physical effects, we provide ingredients that will aid in the reconstruction of the cosmological model from small-scale CMB anisotropy data. We accurately calibrate the model-independent effects of diffusion and reionization damping which provide potentially the most robust informatio...

Abstract We forecast the number of galaxy clusters that can be detected via thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (tSZ) signals by future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, primarily wide area survey CMB-S4 experiment but also CMB-S4's smaller de-lensing and proposed CMB-HD experiment. predict will detect 75,000 with its f sky = 50% 14,000 deep 3%. Of these, approximately 1350 at z ? 2, a regi...

We investigate constraints on cosmic reionization extracted from the Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. We combine the Planck CMB anisotropy data in temperature with the low-multipole polarization data to fit ⇤CDM models with various parameterizations of the reionization histo y. We obtain a Thomson optical depth ⌧ = 0.058 ± 0.012 for the commonly adopted instantaneous reionization ...

Gravitational lensing of photons in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) can be described by an integrated potential along the line of sight, the CMB lensing potential. Covariances in maps of the CMB are generated by the lensing effect, and are used to reconstruct the lensing potential itself, which is a useful probe of the matter distribution. The CMB lensing potential has been measured to hi...

I review recent progress towards a detailed understanding of the power spectrum of cosmic string perturbations induced on the Microwave Background (CMB). The use of a simple analytic model allows to include important effects that have not been included in previous studies. These effects are potential fluctuations on the last scattering surface (the Sachs-Wolfe effect) and Doppler CMB perturbati...

Gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) encodes cosmological information in the observed anisotropies of temperature and polarization. Accurate extraction of this additional information requires precise modeling of the covariance matrix of the power spectra of observed CMB fields. We introduce a new analytical model to describe the non-Gaussian structure of this covarianc...

We investigate the behaviour of dark energy using the recently released supernova data of Riess et al. (2004) and a model independent parameterization for dark energy (DE). We find that, if no priors are imposed on Ω0m and h, DE which evolves with time provides a better fit to the SNe data than ΛCDM. This is also true if we include results from the WMAP CMB data. From a joint analysis of SNe+CM...

We first compare the cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing model of Seljak with the empirical model of Lieu & Mittaz to determine if the latter approach implies a larger effect on the CMB power spectrum. We find that the empirical model gives significantly higher results for the magnification dispersion, σ , at small scales (θ < 30 arcmin) than that of Seljak, assuming standard cosmological...

We first compare the CMB lensing model of Seljak (1996) with the empirical model of Lieu & Mittaz (2005) to determine if the latter approach implies a larger effect on the CMB power-spectrum. We find that the empirical model gives significantly higher results for the magnification dispersion, σ, at small scales (θ < 30) than that of Seljak (1996), assuming standard cosmological parameters. Howe...

We consider the cosmological constraints on the holographic dark energy model by using the data set available from the type Ia supernovae (SNIa), CMB and BAO observations. The constrained parameters are critical to determine the quintessence or quintom character the model. The SNIa and joint SNIa+CMB+BAO analysis give the best-fit results for β with priors on Ωm0 and ω0. Using montecarlo we obt...