CMB Anisotropies, Cosmological Parameters and Fundamental Physics: Current Status & Perspectives

I describe briefly the Cosmic Microwave Background (hereafter CMB) physics which explains why high accuracy observations of its spatial structure are a unique observational tool both for the determination of the global cosmological parameters and to constrain observationally the physics of the early universe. I also briefly survey the many experiments which have measured the anisotropies of the CMB and led to crucial advances in observational Cosmology. The somewhat frantic series of new results has recently culminated with the outcome of the WMAP satellite which confirmed earlier results, set new standards of accuracy, and suggested that the Universe may have reionised earlier than anticipated. Many more CMB experiments are currently taking data or being planned, with the Planck satellite on the 2007 Horizon poised to extract all the cosmological information in the temperature anisotropies, and foray deeply into polarisation.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of "Where Cosmology and Fundamental Physics Meet", 23-26 June, 2003, Marseille, Franc

Large scale CMB anomalies from thawing cosmic strings

Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings imprint their signature in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Anisotropies after recombination. Being almost frozen in the Hubble flow, these strings are quasi static and evade almost all of the previously derived constraints on their tension while being able to source large scale anisotropies in the CMB sky. Using a local variance estimator on thousand of numerically simulated Nambu-Goto all sky maps, we compute the expected signal and show that it can mimic a dipole modulation at large angular scales while being negligible at small angles. Interestingly, such a scenario generically produces one cold spot from the thawing of a cosmic string loop. Mixed with anisotropies of inflationary origin, we find that a few strings of tension GU = O(1) x 10^(-6) match the amplitude of the dipole modulation reported in the Planck satellite measurements and could be at the origin of other large scale anomalies.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures, uses jcappub. References added, matches published versio

The Structure and Dynamical Evolution of Dark Matter Halos

(Shortened) We use N-body simulations to investigate the structure and dynamical evolution of dark matter halos in galaxy clusters. Our sample consists of nine massive halos from an EdS universe with scale free power spectrum and n = -1. Halos are resolved by ~20000 particles each, with a dynamical resolution of 20-25 kpc. Large scale tidal fields are included up to L=150 Mpc using background particles. The halo formation process can be characterized by the alternation of two dynamical configurations: a merging phase and a relaxation phase, defined by their signature on the evolution of the total mass and rms velocity. Halos spend on average one 1/3 of their evolution in the merging phase and 2/3 in the relaxation phase. Using this definition, we study the density profiles and their change during the halo history. The average density profiles are fitted by the NFW analytical model with an rms residual of 17% between the virial radius Rv and 0.01 Rv. The Hernquist (1990) profiles fits the same halos with an rms residual of 26%. The trend with mass of the scale radius of these fits is marginally consistent with that found by Cole & Lacey (1996): in comparison our halos are more centrally concentrated, and the relation between scale radius and halo mass is slightly steeper. We find a moderately large scatter in this relation, due both to dynamical evolution within halos and to fluctuations in the halo population. We analyze the dynamical equilibrium of our halos using the Jeans' equation, and find that on average they are approximately in equilibrium within their virial radius. Finally, we find that the projected mass profiles of our simulated halos are in very good agreement with the profiles of three rich galaxy clusters derived from strong and weak gravitational lensing observations.Comment: 20 pages, Latex, with all figures included. Modified to match the published versio

Kurtosis of Large-Scale Cosmic Fields

An attractive and simple hypothesis for the formation of large-scale structure is that it developed by gravitational instability from primordial fluctuations with an initially Gaussian probability distribution. Non-linear gravitational evolution drives the distribution away from the Gaussian form, generating measurable skewness and kurtosis even when the variance of the fluctuations is much smaller than unity. We use perturbation theory to compute the kurtosis of the mass density field and the velocity divergence field that arises during the weakly non-linear evolution of initially Gaussian fluctuations. We adopt an Einstein--de~Sitter universe for the perturbative calculations, and we discuss the generalization to a universe of arbitrary $\Omega$. We obtain semi-analytic results for the case of scale-free, power-law spectra of the initial fluctuations and final smoothing of cosmic fields with a Gaussian filter. We also give an exact analytical formula for the dependence of the skewness of these fields on the power spectrum index. We show that the kurtosis decreases with the power spectrum index, and we compare our more accurate results for the kurtosis to previous estimates from Monte Carlo integrations. We also compare our results to values obtained from cosmological N-body simulations with power-law initial spectra. Measurements of the skewness and kurtosis parameters can be used to test the hypothesis that structure in the universe formed by gravitational instability from Gaussian initial conditions.Comment: 29 pp incl. 8 figs, uuencoded compressed postscript, submitted to MNRAS, preprints CAMK/281, IASSNS-AST 94/3

Probing inflation with CMB polarization : weak lensing effect on the covariance of CMB spectra

CMB anisotropies are modified by the weak lensing effect of intervening large scale structures on the photon path from the last scattering surface to the observer. This has to be accounted for when observational data of sensitive experiments are used to constrain cosmological models. A common approximation to analyze the CMB angular power spectra is to include only the Gaussian part of the lensing correction and to ignore the non-gaussian terms in the error covariance matrix of the spectra. In order to investigate the validity of this approximation, we computed these non-Gaussian terms by using a perturbative expansion method. We present a graphical method to write down any N-point correlation functions at any order in lensing. We use a pedagogical approach to demonstrate that neglecting non-gaussian terms is an accurate approximation for all polarizations but B, and it will remain so even for the analysis of very sensitive post-Planck experiments. For the B polarization, non-gaussian contributions up to order 4 must be taken into account.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, JCAP style. Improved to match published version : annex A expanded, references added, few minor correction

Previrialization: Perturbative and N-Body Results

We present a series of N-body experiments which confirm the reality of the previrialization effect. We also use weakly nonlinear perturbative approach to study the phenomenon. These two approaches agree when the rms density contrast, $\sigma$, is small; more surprisingly, they remain in agreement when $\sigma \approx 1$. When the slope of the initial power spectrum is $n>-1$, nonlinear tidal interactions slow down the growth of density fluctuations and the magnitude of the suppression increases when $n$ (i.e. the relative amount of small scale power) is increased. For $n<-1$ we see an opposite effect: the fluctuations grow more rapidly than in linear theory. The transition occurs at $n=-1$ when the weakly nonlinear correction to $\sigma$ is close to zero and the growth rate is close to linear. Our results resolve recent controversy between two N-body studies of previrialization. Peebles (1990) assumed $n=0$ and found strong evidence in support of previrialization, while Evrard \& Crone (1992), who assumed $n=-1$, reached opposite conclusions. As we show here, the initial conditions with $n=-1$ are rather special because the nonlinear effects nearly cancel out for that particular spectrum. In addition to our calculations for scale-free initial spectra, we show results for a more realistic spectrum of Peacock \& Dodds (1994). Its slope near the scale usually adopted for normalization is close to $-1$, so $\sigma$ is close to linear. Our results retroactively justify linear normalization at 8$h^{-1}$ Mpc, while also demonstrating the danger and limitations of this practice.Comment: Significantly revised, 25 pages, uuencoded compressed postscript, figures included, to appear in Ap

Contribution of point sources to the soft gamma-ray Galactic emission

The nature of the soft gamma-ray (20-200 keV) Galactic emission has been a matter of debate for a long time. Previous experiments have tried to separate the point source contribution from the real interstellar emission, but with a rather poor spatial resolution, they concluded that the interstellar emission could be a large fraction of the total Galactic emission. INTEGRAL, having both high resolution and high sensitivity, is well suited to reassess more precisely this problem. Using the INTEGRAL core program Galactic Center Deep Exposure (GCDE), we estimate the contribution of detected point sources to the total Galactic flux.Comment: Proceedings of the 5th INTEGRAL Workshop, Munich 16-20 February 2004. ESA SP-55

Probing CMB Non-Gaussianity Using Local Curvature

It is possible to classify pixels of a smoothed cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuation map according to their local curvature in ``hill'', ``lake'' and ``saddle'' regions. In the Gaussian case, fractional areas occupied by pixels of each kind can be computed analytically for families of excursion sets as functions of threshold and moments of the fluctuation power spectrum. We show how the shape of these functions can be used to constrain accurately the level of non-Gaussianity in the data by applying these new statistics to an hypothetical mixed model suggested by Bouchet et al. (2001). According to our simple test, with only one 12.5x12.5 deg^2 map, Planck should be able to detect with a high significance a non-Gaussian level as weak as 10% in temperature standard deviation (rms) (5% in C_l), whereas a marginal detection would be possible for MAP with a non-Gaussian level around 30% in temperature (15% in C_l).Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures, submitted to MNRA

Moments of the Counts Distribution in the 1.2 Jy IRAS Redshift Survey

We derive the volume-averaged 2, 3, 4, and 5-point correlation functions from the moments of the Count probability distribution function of a redshift survey of IRAS galaxies, and find them all to be reasonably well-described by power laws. Weak systematic effects with the sample size provide evidence for stronger clustering of galaxies of higher luminosity on small scales. Nevertheless, remarkably tight relationships hold between the correlation functions of different order. In particular, the ``normalized" skewness defined by the ratio $S_3\equiv \bar{\xi_3} / \bar{\xi_2}^2$ varies at most weakly with scale in the range $0.1 < \bar{\xi_2} < 10$. That is, $S_3$ is close to constant ($=1.5\pm 0.5$) from weakly to strongly non-linear scales. Furthermore, we find that the void probability function obeys a scaling relation with density to great precision, in accord with the scale-invariance hypothesis ($\bar{\xi_N}\propto\bar{\xi_2}^{N-1}$).Comment: 38 pages, postscript file (1.3 Megabytes) . IAS preprint number AST 93/2