The Effect of Matter and Baryon Densities on the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy

As a full-grown science, cosmology is relatively young. Even though man has pondered the existence and structure of the universe throughout his history, the lack of actual observational data has prevented analytical research. Observational cosmology can be seen to have born in the 1920’s when Edwin Hubble discovered that the galaxies surrounding us are receding in all directions. This led to the conclusion that the universe around us is itself actually expanding. Expansion occurring isotropically in all directions indicates that the universe was once much denser and hotter. So hot that the matter in it has been completely ionized plasma. The decrease in temperature caused by the expansion is calculated to have caused the neutralizing of the plasma, recombination, over thirteen billion years ago. The instant is cosmologically remarkable, since light that until that moment scattered frequently from the charged particles now began to propagate freely. Initially at three thousand Kelvin temperature, the radiation has cooled down due to expansion and is now observed as the three Kelvin cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). First observations of the existence of the CMB date back to 1965. Since the background radiation has traveled its long journey relatively unchanged, its study can yield direct information on the conditions of the early universe. Theoretically it was expected, well before observational confirmation in 1992, that the CMB should have a structure that reflects those inhomogeneities, that have now undergone their ten billion years of evolution, to become the large scale structure we observe: galaxies, galaxy clusters and the evermore larger entities. In this thesis we examine, how the effects of two cosmological parameters, the matter and baryon densities of the universe, manifest in the pre-recombination dynamics and how these effects are reflected in the structure of the observed CMB anisotropy. Baryons are the “ordinary” matter all around us, protons and neutrons. The concept of “matter” is extended to include the unknown dark matter, the existence of which is only known through its gravitational effects. We will review the equations that are necessary to track the evolution of the primordial perturbations. By a computer program based on those equations we display how the early universe dynamics change with the values of the density parameters. Finally we will show how these effects are reflected in the angular power spectrum that describes the structure of the microwave background

Simulating Calibration and Beam Systematics for a Future CMB Space Mission with the TOAST Package

We address in this work the instrumental systematic errors that can potentially affect the forthcoming and future Cosmic Microwave Background experiments aimed at observing its polarized emission. In particular, we focus on the systematics induced by the beam and calibration, which are considered the major sources of leakage from total intensity measurements to polarization. We simulated synthetic data sets with Time-Ordered Astrophysics Scalable Tools, a publicly available simulation and data analysis package. We also propose a mitigation technique aiming at reducing the leakage by means of a template fitting approach. This technique has shown promising results reducing the leakage by 2 orders of magnitude at the power spectrum level when applied to a realistic simulated data set of the LiteBIRD satellite mission

Making cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization maps with MADAM

Peer reviewe

Planck early results X : Statistical analysis of Sunyaev-Zeldovich scaling relations for X-ray galaxy clusters

Peer reviewe

Destriping CMB temperature and polarization maps

We study destriping as a map-making method for temperature-and-polarization data for cosmic microwave background observations. We present a particular implementation of destriping and study the residual error in output maps, using simulated data corresponding to the 70 GHz channel of the Planck satellite, but assuming idealized detector and beam properties. The relevant residual map is the difference between the output map and a binned map obtained from the signal + white noise part of the data stream. For destriping it can be divided into six components: unmodeled correlated noise, white noise reference baselines, reference baselines of the pixelization noise from the signal, and baseline errors from correlated noise, white noise, and signal. These six components contribute differently to the different angular scales in the maps. We derive analytical results for the first three components. This study is related to Planck LFI activities.We study destriping as a map-making method for temperature-and-polarization data for cosmic microwave background observations. We present a particular implementation of destriping and study the residual error in output maps, using simulated data corresponding to the 70 GHz channel of the Planck satellite, but assuming idealized detector and beam properties. The relevant residual map is the difference between the output map and a binned map obtained from the signal + white noise part of the data stream. For destriping it can be divided into six components: unmodeled correlated noise, white noise reference baselines, reference baselines of the pixelization noise from the signal, and baseline errors from correlated noise, white noise, and signal. These six components contribute differently to the different angular scales in the maps. We derive analytical results for the first three components. This study is related to Planck LFI activities.We study destriping as a map-making method for temperature-and-polarization data for cosmic microwave background observations. We present a particular implementation of destriping and study the residual error in output maps, using simulated data corresponding to the 70 GHz channel of the Planck satellite, but assuming idealized detector and beam properties. The relevant residual map is the difference between the output map and a binned map obtained from the signal + white noise part of the data stream. For destriping it can be divided into six components: unmodeled correlated noise, white noise reference baselines, reference baselines of the pixelization noise from the signal, and baseline errors from correlated noise, white noise, and signal. These six components contribute differently to the different angular scales in the maps. We derive analytical results for the first three components. This study is related to Planck LFI activities.Peer reviewe

Planck early results XXVI : Detection with Planck and confirmation by XMM-Newton of PLCK G266.6–27.3, an exceptionally X-ray luminous and massive galaxy cluster at z ~ 1

Peer reviewe

Planck early results XIX : All-sky temperature and dust optical depth from Planck and IRAS. Constraints on the “dark gas” in our Galaxy

Peer reviewe

Planck early results XIII : Statistical properties of extragalactic radio sources in the Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue

Peer reviewe

Planck early results XVI : The Planck view of nearby galaxies

Peer reviewe

Hints of Isocurvature Perturbations in the Cosmic Microwave Background?

The improved data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy allow a better determination of the adiabaticity of the primordial perturbation. Interestingly, we find that recent CMB data seem to favor a contribution of a primordial isocurvature mode where the entropy perturbation is positively correlated with the primordial curvature perturbation and has a large spectral index (niso ~ 3). With 4 additional parameters we obtain a better fit to the CMB data by Delta chi^2 = 9.7 compared to an adiabatic model. For this best-fit model the nonadiabatic contribution to the CMB temperature variance is 4%. According to a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis the nonadiabatic contribution is positive at more than 95% C.L. The exact C.L. depends somewhat on the choice of priors, and we discuss the effect of different priors as well as additional cosmological data.Comment: v1&2: 4 pages, 2 figures. v4: 16 pages, 7 figures, iopart style. Revised the 'Other cosmological data' section, added a detailed discussion on the effect of priors, and added many figures. Published versio