In view of the growing tension between the dipole anisotropy of number counts of cosmologically distant sources and of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), we investigate the number count dipole induced by primordial perturbations with wavelength …
The smoothing effect of lensing to the CMB temperature power spectrum is, to some extent, degenerate with oscillatory modulations of the primordial power spectrum, in particular if the frequency is close to that of the acoustic peaks. We consider the …
What can gravitational waves tell us about cosmology?
What can we learn from the cosmic microwave background?
The latest analysis of the cosmic microwave background by the Planck team finds more smoothing of the acoustic peaks in the temperature power spectrum than predicted by ΛCDM. Here we investigate whether this additional smoothing can be mimicked by an …
It has been argued that oscillatory features from spectator fields in the primordial power spectrum could be a probe of alternatives to inflation. In this work, we soften this claim by showing that the frequency and amplitude dependence of the …
We reconsider the observed CMB dipolar asymmetry in the context of open inflation, where a supercurvature mode might survive the bubble nucleation. If such a supercurvature mode modulates the amplitude of the curvature power spectrum, it would easily …
We compute for general single-field inflation the intrinsic non-Gaussianity due to the self-interactions of the inflaton field in the squeezed limit. We recover the consistency relation in the context of the δN formalism, and argue that there is a …
From higher dimensional theories, e.g. string theory, one expects the presence of nonminimally coupled scalar fields. We review the notion of conformal frames in cosmology and emphasize their physical equivalence, which holds at least at a classical …
Physical equivalence between different conformal frames in scalar-tensor theory of gravity is a known fact. However, assuming that matter minimally couples to the metric of a particular frame, which we call the matter Jordan frame, the matter point …