Jerusalem WS lecture notes: 07. Guest lecture on cosmology with the CMB

By C. Bennett, the PI of WMAP, among many other things. Slides not (yet) available.

• COBE:
  • anisotropy
  • shape of the CMB spectrum: precision cosmology
  • CDM: anisotropy low -- from Silk damping?
  • still only sampling superhorizon scales
  WMAP:
  • spinning dust
  • polarisation maps
  • average subtraction: foreground removal
  • foreground modelling: spectral differences, power law spectral indices
  • n_s -- inflation tilt, \tau -- optical depth of scattering, \Delta -- amplitude of fluctuation predicted by inflation
  • E, B modes: gradient, curl
  • 1st acoustic peak: horizon size at decoupling: super-horizon correlation from polarization (inflation)
  • rarefaction/compression peaks, BAO
  • 1st and 2nd peak heights ratio: baryon density --> time of decoupling, sound speed, horizon scale (145.7 Mpc), d_A = 14Gpc
  • geometric degeneracy of CMB measurements
  • constraining inflation: primordial tilt, flatness, tensor to scalar ratio, energy scale -- only from polarization data
  • is the anisotropy Gaussian? 3PCF
  • "Last stand before WMAP" article
  • the 6 parameter space volume was reduced 68k times
  • LAMBDA @Heasarc -- data
  • CLASS experiment
  • WMAP9 -- optimal weighting of the power spectrum