Cosmic background radiation

Cosmic background radiation is electromagnetic radiation that fills all space. The origin of this radiation depends on the region of the spectrum that is observed. One component is the cosmic microwave background. This component is redshifted photons that have freely streamed from an epoch when the Universe became transparent for the first time to radiation. Its discovery and detailed observations of its properties are considered one of the major confirmations of the Big Bang. The discovery (by chance in 1965) of the cosmic background radiation suggests that the early universe was dominated by a radiation field, a field of extremely high temperature and pressure. The Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect shows the phenomena of radiant cosmic background radiation interacting with "electron" clouds distorting the spectrum of the radiation. There is also background radiation in the infrared, x-rays, etc., with different causes, and they can sometimes be resolved into an individual source. See cos

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On the dark radiation problem in the axiverse

Anna Tokareva

String scenarios generically predict that we live in a so called axiverse: the Universe with about a hundred of light axion species which are decoupled from the Standard Model particles. However, the axions can couple to the inflaton which leads to their production after inflation. Then, these axions remain in the expanding Universe contributing to the dark radiation component, which is severely bounded from present cosmological data. We place a general constraint on the axion production rate and apply it to several variants of reasonable inflaton-to-axion couplings. The limit merely constrains the number of ultralight axions and the relative strength of inflaton-to-axion coupling. It is valid in both large and small field inflationary models irrespectively of the axion energy scales and masses. Thus, the limit is complementary to those associated with the Universe overclosure and axion isocurvature fluctuations. In particular, a hundred of axions is forbidden if inflaton universally couples to all the fields at reheating. In the case of gravitational sector being responsible for the reheating of the Universe (which is a natural option in all inflationary models with modified gravity), the axion production can be efficient. We find that in the Starobinsky R-2-inflation even a single axion (e.g. the standard QCD-axion) is in tension with the Planck data, making the model inconsistent with the axiverse. The general conclusion is that an inflation with inefficient reheating mechanism and low reheating temperature may be in tension with the presence of light scalars.

Iop Publishing Ltd2017

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CMB photons shedding light on dark matter

Benjamin Audren, Gaëlle Giesen, Julien Lesgourgues

The annihilation or decay of Dark Matter (DM) particles could affect the thermal history of the universe and leave an observable signature in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. We update constraints on the annihilation rate of DM particles in the smooth cosmological background, using WMAP7 and recent small-scale CMB data. With a systematic analysis based on the Press-Schechter formalism, we also show that DM annihilation in halos at small redshift may explain entirely the reionization patterns observed in the CMB, under reasonable assumptions concerning the concentration and formation redshift of halos. We find that a mixed reionization model based on DM annihilation in halos as well as star formation at a redshift z similar or equal to 6.5 could simultaneously account for CMB observations and satisfy constraints inferred from the Gunn-Peterson effect. However, these models tend to reheat the inter-galactic medium (IGM) well above observational bounds: by including a realistic prior on the IGM temperature at low redshift and allowing most of the reionization to be due to star formation, we find stronger cosmological bounds on the annihilation cross-section than with the CMB alone.

Iop Publishing Ltd2012

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Low-l CMB analysis and inpainting

Anaïs Marie Rassat, Jean-Luc Starck

Reconstructing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in the Galactic plane is extremely difficult due to the dominant foreground emissions such as dust, free-free or synchrotron. For cosmological studies, the standard approach consists in masking this area where the reconstruction is insufficient. This leads to difficulties for the statistical analysis of the CMB map, especially at very large scales (to study for instance the low quadrupole, integrated Sachs Wolfe effect, axis of evil, etc.). We investigate how well some inpainting techniques can recover the low-l spherical harmonic coefficients. We introduce three new inpainting techniques based on three different kinds of priors: sparsity, energy, and isotropy, which we compare. We show that sparsity and energy priors can lead to extremely high-quality reconstruction, within 1% of the cosmic variance for a mask with a sky coverage larger than 80%.

Edp Sciences S A2013

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Big Bang

Le Big Bang (« Grand Boum ») est un modèle cosmologique utilisé par les scientifiques pour décrire l'origine et l'évolution de l'Univers. De façon générale, le terme « Big Bang » est associé à toute

Fond diffus cosmologique

Le fond diffus cosmologique (FDC, ou CMB pour l'anglais cosmic microwave background, « fond cosmique de micro-ondes ») est un rayonnement électromagnétique très homogène observé dans toutes les direc

Relativité générale

La relativité générale est une théorie relativiste de la gravitation, c'est-à-dire qu'elle décrit l'influence de la présence de matière, et plus généralement d'énergie, sur le mouvement des astres e

PHYS-402: Astrophysics IV : observational cosmology

Cosmology is the study of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. This course describes the principal themes of cosmology, as seen from the point of view of observations.

PHYS-439: Introduction to astroparticle physics

We present the role of particle physics in cosmology and in the description of astrophysical phenomena. We also present the methods and technologies for the observation of cosmic particles.

PHYS-323: Astrophysics II

Ce cours est une introduction à la physique stellaire. On y expose les notions indispensables à la compréhension du fonctionnement d'une étoile et à la construction de modèles de structure interne et d'évolution stellaires. On donne aussi des clés d'interprétation des spectres stellaires.