We show that the detection of acoustic oscillations in both upcoming cosmic microwave background (CMB) satellite experiments and large-redshift surveys can yield 5% determinations of and , an order-of-magnitude H Q 0 m improvement over CMB data alone. CMB anisotropies provide the sound horizon at recombination as a standard ruler. For reasonable baryon fractions, this scale is imprinted on the ...

In this talk presented at the 5th Rencontres du Vietnam 2004, we discuss our preliminary investigations into voids of primordial origin. We show that if voids in the cold dark matter distribution existed at the epoch of decoupling, they could contribute significantly to the apparent rise in cosmic microwave background (CMB) power on small scales detected by the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) De...

Separating foregrounds from the signal is one of the big challenges in cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. A simple way to estimate the CMB temperature in a given pixel is to fit for the amplitudes of the CMB and the various foreground components. The variance squared of this estimator is shown to be equal to [(FDF) σ (0) θ + σ 2 shape], where σ (0) θ is the variance in the absence o...

The lensing of CMB photons by intervening large-scale structure leaves a characteristic imprint on its arcminute-scale anisotropy that can be used to map the dark matter distribution in projection on degree scales or ∼ 100h Mpc comoving. We introduce a new algorithm for mass reconstruction which optimally utilizes information from the weak lensing of CMB anisotropies in the damping tail. Indivi...

The breakdown of statistical homogeneity and isotropy of cosmic perturbations is a generic feature of ultra large scale structure of the cosmos, in particular, of non trivial cosmic topology. The statistical isotropy (SI) of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations (CMB anisotropy) is sensitive to this breakdown on the largest scales comparable to, and even beyond the cosmic hor...

The low multipoles of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy possess some strange properties like the alignment of the quadrupole and the octopole, and the extreme planarity or the extreme sphericity of some multipoles, respectively. In this paper the CMB anisotropy of several multi-connected space forms is investigated with respect to the maximal angular momentum dispersion and the M...

We question the global universe isotropy by probing the alignment of local structures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The original method proposed relies on a steerable wavelet decomposition of the CMB signal on the sphere. The analysis of the first-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data identifies a mean preferred plane with a normal direction close to the CMB dipol...

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) comprises the oldest photons in the universe and is arguably our most direct cosmological observable. All precise and accurate measurements of its attributes serve to distinguish between cosmological models. Detector technology and observing techniques have advanced to the point where fluctuations in the CMB of order a few microkelvin are measured almost ro...

Inflationary gravitational waves (GW) contribute to the curl component in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Cosmic shear--gravitational lensing of the CMB--converts a fraction of the dominant gradient polarization to the curl component. Higher-order correlations can be used to map the cosmic shear and subtract this contribution to the curl. Arcminute resolution will be ...

We assess the accuracy with which Ωm and ΩΛ can be measured by combining various types of upcoming experiments. Useful expressions for the Fisher information matrix are derived for classical cosmological tests involving luminosity (e.g., SN Ia), angular size, age and number counts. These geometric probes are found to be quite complementary both to each other and to inferences from cluster abund...