Anomalous attenuation of extraordinary waves in the ionosphere heating experiments

Multiple scattering of radio waves by artificial random irregularities HF-induced in the ionosphere F region may cause significant attenuation of both ordinary and extraordinary waves together with common anomalous absorption of ordinary waves due to their non-linear conversion into plasma waves. To demonstrate existence and strength of this effect, direct measurements of attenuation of both powerful pump wave and weak probing waves of extraordinary polarization have been carried out during an experimental campaign on September 6, 7 and 9, 1999 at the Sura heating facility. The attenuation magnitude of extraordinary waves reaches of 1-10 dB over a background attenuation caused by natural irregularities. It is interpreted in the paper on the base of the theory of multiple scattering from the artificial random irregularities with characteristic scale lengths of 0.1-1 km. Simple procedure for determining of irregularity spectrum parameters from the measured attenuation of extraordinary waves has been implemented and some conclusions about the artificial irregularity formation have been obtained.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

The Radiation Transfer at a Layer of Magnetized Plasma With Random Irregularities

The problem of radio wave reflection from an optically thick plane monotonous layer of magnetized plasma is considered at present work. The plasma electron density irregularities are described by spatial spectrum of an arbitrary form. The small-angle scattering approximation in the invariant ray coordinates is suggested for analytical investigation of the radiation transfer equation. The approximated solution describing spatial-and-angular distribution of radiation reflected from a plasma layer has been obtained. The obtained solution has been investigated numerically for the case of the ionospheric radio wave propagation. Two effects are the consequence of multiple scattering: change of the reflected signal intensity and anomalous refraction.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Peculiarities of anisotropy and polarization as an indicator of noises in the CMB maps

We discuss some new problems of the modern cosmology which arose after the BOOMERANG and MAXIMA-1 successful missions. Statistics of high peaks of the CMB anisotropy is analyzed and we discuss possible inner structure of such peaks in the observational data of future MAP and PLANCK missions. We have investigated geometrical and statistical properties of the CMB polarization around such high isolated peaks of anisotropy in the presence of a polarized pixel noise and point sources. The structure of polarization fields in the vicinity of singular points with zero polarization is very sensitive to the level of pixel noises and point sources in the CMB maps.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure

The Hot and Cold Spots in the WMAP Data are Not Hot and Cold Enough

This paper presents a frequentist analysis of the hot and cold spots of the cosmic microwave background data collected by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). We compare the WMAP temperature statistics of extrema (number of extrema, mean excursion, variance, skewness and kurtosis of the excursion) to Monte-Carlo simulations. We find that, on average, the local maxima (high temperatures in the anisotropy) are too cold and the local minima are too warm. In order to quantify this claim we describe a two-sided statistical hypothesis test which we advocate for other investigations of the Gaussianity hypothesis. Using this test we reject the isotropic Gaussian hypothesis at more than 99% confidence in a well-defined way. Our claims are based only on regions that are outside the most conservative WMAP foreground mask. We perform our test separately on maxima and minima, and on the north and south ecliptic and Galactic hemispheres and reject Gaussianity at above 95% confidence for almost all tests of the mean excursions. The same test also shows the variance of the maxima and minima to be low in the ecliptic north (99% confidence), but consistent in the south; this effect is not as pronounced in the Galactic north and south hemispheres.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, text updated to match published version, conclusions unchange

Ionization history of the cosmic plasma in the light of the recent CBI and future PLANCK data

The paper is devoted to the methods of determination of the cosmological parameters from recent CMB observations. We show that the more complex models of kinetics of recombination with a few "missing" parameters describing the recombination process provide better agreement between measured and expected characteristics of the CMB anisotropy. In particular, we consider the external sources of the Ly-{alpha} and Ly-{c} radiation and the model with the strong clustering of baryonic component. These factors can constrain the estimates of the cosmological parameters usually discussed. We demonstrate also that the measurements of polarization can improve these estimates and, for the precision expected for the PLANCK mission, allow to discriminate a wide class of models.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, extended and corrected after the referee report. Accepted in Ap

Peaks in the Cosmic Microwave Background: flat versus open models

We present properties of the peaks (maxima) of the CMB anisotropies expected in flat and open CDM models. We obtain analytical expressions of several topological descriptors: mean number of maxima and the probability distribution of the gaussian curvature and the eccentricity of the peaks. These quantities are calculated as functions of the radiation power spectrum, assuming a gaussian distribution of temperature anisotropies. We present results for angular resolutions ranging from 5' to 20' (antenna FWHM), scales that are relevant for the MAP and COBRAS/SAMBA space missions and the ground-based interferometer experiments. Our analysis also includes the effects of noise. We find that the number of peaks can discriminate between standard CDM models, and that the gaussian curvature distribution provides a useful test for these various models, whereas the eccentricity distribution can not distinguish between them.Comment: 13 pages latex file using aasms4.sty + 3 tables + 2 postscript figures, to appear in ApJ (March 1997

How exactly did the Universe become neutral?

We present a refined treatment of H, He I, and He II recombination in the early Universe. The difference from previous calculations is that we use multi-level atoms and evolve the population of each level with redshift by including all bound-bound and bound-free transitions. In this framework we follow several hundred atomic energy levels for H, He I, and He II combined. The main improvements of this method over previous recombination calculations are: (1) allowing excited atomic level populations to depart from an equilibrium distribution; (2) replacing the total recombination coefficient with recombination to and photoionization from each level directly at each redshift step; and (3) correct treatment of the He I atom, including the triplet and singlet states. We find that the ionization fraction x_e = n_e/n_H is approximately 10% smaller at redshifts <~800 than in previous calculations, due to the non-equilibrium of the excited states of H, which is caused by the strong but cool radiation field at those redshifts. In addition we find that He I recombination is delayed compared with previous calculations, and occurs only just before H recombination. These changes in turn can affect the predicted power spectrum of microwave anisotropies at the few percent level. Other improvements such as including molecular and ionic species of H, including complete heating and cooling terms for the evolution of the matter temperature, including collisional rates, and including feedback of the secondary spectral distortions on the radiation field, produce negligible change to x_e. The lower x_e at low z found in this work affects the abundances of H molecular and ionic species by 10-25%. However this difference is probably not larger than other uncertainties in the reaction rates.Comment: 24 pages, including 18 figures, using emulateapj.sty, to appear in ApJ, the code recfast can be obtained at http://www.astro.ubc.ca/people/scott/recfast.html (in FORTRAN) and http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~sasselov/rec/ (in C