13970812
Probing the last scattering surface through recent and future CMB observations
We have constrained the extended (delayed and accelerated) models of hydrogen recombination, by investigating associated changes of the position and the width of the last scattering surface. Using the recently obtained CMB and SDSS data, we find that the recently derived data constraints favor the accelerated recombination model, although the other models (standard, delayed recombination) are not ruled out at 1σ confidence level. If the accelerated recombination had actually occurred in our early Universe, it is likely that baryonic clustering on small scales would have been the cause of it. By comparing the ionization history of baryonic cloud models with that of the best-fit accelerated recombination model, we find that some portion of our early Universe has baryonic underdensity. We have made a forecast for the PLANCK data constraint, which shows that we will be able to rule out the standard or delayed recombination models if the recombination in our early Universe had proceeded with α~−0.01 or lower, and residual foregrounds and systematic effects are negligible.
119279630
CMB E/B decomposition of incomplete sky: a pixel space approach
CMB polarization signal may be decomposed into gradient-like (E) and curl-like (B) mode. We have investigated E/B decomposition in pixel space. We find E/B mixing due to incomplete sky is localized in pixel-space, and negligible in the regions far away from the masked area. By estimating the expected local leakage power, we have diagnosed ambiguous pixels. Our criteria for ambiguous pixels (i.e. rc) is associated with the tensor-to-scalar ratio of B mode pow er spectrum, which the leakage power is comparable to. By setting rc to a lower value, we may reduce leakage level, but reduce sky fraction at the same time. Therefore, we have solved ∂�Cl/∂rc = 0, and obtained the optimal rc, which minimizes the estimation uncertainty, given a foreground mask and noise level. We have applied our method to a simulated map blocked by a foreground (diffuse + point source) mask. Our simulation shows leakage power is smaller than primordial (i.e. unlensed) B mode power spectrum of tensor-to-scalar ratio r ∼ 1× 10 −3 at wide range of multipoles (50. l. 2000), while allowing us to retain sky fraction∼ 0.48.
119245195
CMB map derived from the WMAP data through harmonic internal linear combination
We are presenting an internal linear combination CMB map, in which the foreground is reduced through harmonic variance minimization. We have derived our method by converting a general form of pixel-space approach into spherical harmonic space, maintaining full correspondence. By working in spherical harmonic space, spatial variability of linear weights is incorporated in a self-contained manner and our linear weights are continuous functions of position over the entire sky. The full correspondence to pixel-space approach enables straightforward physical interpretation on our approach. In variance minimization of a linear combination map, the existence of a cross term between residual foregrounds and CMB makes the linear combination of minimum variance differ from that of minimum foreground. We have developed an iterative foreground reduction method, where perturbative correction is made for the cross term. Our CMB map derived from the WMAP data is in better agreement with the WMAP best-fit {lambda}CDM model than the WMAP team's internal linear combination map. We find that our method's capacity to clean foreground is limited by the availability of enough spherical harmonic coefficients of good signal-to-noise ratio.
119074604
Removing the ISW-lensing bias from the local-form primordial non-Gaussianity estimation
The Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect produces a secondary temperature aniso\-tropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as CMB photons travel through time-varying potentials along the line-of-sight. The main contribution comes from redshifts z2, where dark energy leads to a decay of potentials. As the same photons are gravitationally lensed by these decaying potentials, there exists a high degree of correlation between the ISW effect and CMB lensing, leading to a non-zero three-point correlation (bispectrum) of the observed temperature anisotropy. This ISW-lensing bispectrum, whose shape resembles that of the so-called ``local-form'' primordial bispectrum parametrized by fNL, is known to be the largest contamination of fNL. In order to avoid a spurious detection of primordial non-Gaussianity, we need to remove the ISW-lensing bias. In this work, we investigate three debiasing methods: (I) subtraction of an expected, ensemble average of the ISW-lensing bispectrum; (II) subtraction of a measured ISW-lensing bispectrum; and (III) direct subtraction of an estimated ISW signal from an observed temperature map. One may use an estimation of the ISW map from external non-CMB data or that from the CMB data themselves. As the methods II and III are based on fewer assumptions about the nature of dark energy, they are preferred over the method I. While the methods I and II yield unbiased estimates of fNL with comparable error bars, the method III yields a biased result when the underlying primordial fNL is non-zero and the ISW map is estimated from a lensing potential reconstructed from the observed temperature map. One of the sources of the bias is a lensing reconstruction noise bias which is independent of fNL and can be calculated precisely, but other fNL-dependent terms are difficult to compute reliably. We thus conclude that the method II is the best, model-independent way to remove the ISW-lensing bias of fNL, enabling us to test the physics of inflation with smaller systematic errors.
118189799
The millimeter-wave bolometric interferometer (MBI) for observing the cosmic microwave background polarization
118530966
How accurately can we measure the hydrogen 2S->1S transition rate from the cosmological data?
Recent progress in observational cosmology, and especially the forthcoming PLANCK mission data, open new directions in so-called precision cosmology. In this paper we illustrate this statement considering the accuracy of cosmological determination of the two-quanta decay rate of 2s hydrogen atom state. We show that the PLANCK data will allow us to measure this decay rate significantly better than in the laboratory experiments.
121311744
Polarization of recoil-electron beam in high-energy Moller and Bhabha scattering
Longitudinal and transverse polarizations of the final electron beam in Moller and Bhabha scattering are analyzed in electroweak gauge models involving more than one neutral vector boson. In pure QED, for given initial polarizations of incoming particles, the polarization of the outgoing electron beam is the same for Moller and Bhabha scattering and is energy independent. However, in various electroweak gauge models, we find that the energy dependence and final-state polarizations are in general different for the two scattering processes; thus, observing polarization effects in such scattering processes may be useful to test various gauge models at high energy.
121873957
Electromagnetic properties of the neutrino from neutral-current experiments
14383322
The minimal two DM components with SUSY
We present the dark matter extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model by one more two component stable fermion N toward explaining the recent rising high energy positron spectrum of the PAMELA data. The needed coupling can arise in the flipped-SU(5) GUT.
118704767
First LHC Constraints on Neutralinos
Abstract The ATLAS and CMS Collaborations have recently reported tantalizing hints of the existence of a 125 GeV Higgs-like particle, whose couplings appear to match well the Standard Model (SM) expectations. In this work, we study implications of this observation for the neutralino sector of supersymmetric models, assuming that the Higgs signal gets confirmed. In general, the Higgs decay into neutralinos can be one of its dominant decay channels. Since a large invisible Higgs decay branching ratio would be in conflict with the data, this possibility is now constrained. In particular, we find that most of the region μ 170 GeV , M 1 70 GeV at tan β ∼ 10 and μ 120 GeV , M 1 70 GeV at tan β ∼ 40 is disfavored.
1088379
Axion theory review
I review the axion physics with emphases on the couplings of the very light axion and a possible realization in superstring models.