851 research outputs found
New Probes of Cosmic Microwave Background Large-Scale Anomalies
No full textFifty years of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data played a crucial role in constraining the parameters of the ΛCDM model, where Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and Inflation are the three most important pillars not yet understood. Inflation prescribes an isotropic universe on large scales, and it generates spatially-correlated density fluctuations over the whole Hubble volume. CMB temperature fluctuations on scales bigger than a degree in the sky, affected by modes on super-horizon scale at the time of recombination, are a clean snapshot of the universe after inflation. In addition, the accelerated expansion of the universe, driven by Dark Energy, leaves a hardly detectable imprint in the large-scale temperature sky at late times. Such fundamental predictions have been tested with current CMB data and found to be in tension with what we expect from our simple ΛCDM model. Is this tension just a random fluke or a fundamental issue with the present model?\ud
In this thesis, we present a new framework to probe the lack of large-scale correlations in the temperature sky using CMB polarization data. Our analysis shows that if a suppression in the CMB polarization correlations is detected, it will provide compelling evidence for new physics on super-horizon scale. To further analyze the statistical properties of the CMB temperature sky, we constrain the degree of statistical anisotropy of the CMB in the context of the observed large-scale dipole power asymmetry. We find evidence for a scale-dependent dipolar modulation at 2.5σ. To isolate late-time signals from the primordial ones, we test the anomalously high Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect signal generated by superstructures in the universe. We find that the detected signal is in tension with the expectations from ΛCDM at the 2.5σ level, which is somewhat smaller than what has been previously argued. To conclude, we describe the current status of CMB observations on small scales, highlighting the tensions between Planck, WMAP, and SPT temperature data and how the upcoming data release of the ACTpol experiment will contribute to this matter. We provide a description of the current status of the data-analysis pipeline and discuss its ability to recover large-scale modes
Measurement of the production of high-pTelectrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays in Pb-Pb collisions at sNN=2.76 ATeV
No full textElectrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays (charm and beauty) were measured with the ALICE detector in Pb-Pb collisions at a centre-of-mass of energy root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV. The transverse momentum (pT) differential production yields at mid-rapidity were used to calculate the nuclear modification factor R-AA in the interval 3 < p(T) < 18 GeV/c. The R-AA shows a strong suppression compared to binary scaling of pp collisions at the same energy (up to a factor of 4) in the 10% most central Pb-Pb collisions. There is a centrality trend of suppression, and a weaker suppression (down to a factor of 2) in semi-peripheral (50-80%) collisions is observed. The suppression of electrons in this broad p(T) interval indicates that both charm and beauty quarks lose energy when they traverse the hot medium formed in Pb-Pb collisions at LHC. (C) 2017 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: two-season ACTPol extragalactic point sources and their polarization properties
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The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: a CMB lensing mass map over 2100 square degrees of sky and its cross-correlation with BOSS-CMASS galaxies
No full textThe Atacama Cosmology Telescope: SZ-based masses and dust emission from IR-selected cluster candidates in the SHELA survey
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