Physics of the Cosmic Microwave Background

75 Pages·2013·23.4 MB·English

Physics of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Jens Chluba
School on Cosmological Tools
IFT, Madrid, Spain, Nov 12th - 15th, 2013

Some of the Big Questions of Cosmology
• What is the Universe made of?
• What are the initial conditions?
• Where do all the structures come from?
• Why do things look the way they do?
• Dark energy & dark matter?
• Gravitational Waves?
• Physics beyond the standard model?
Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies help
us to answer these questions!
Planck all sky map
• CMB has a blackbody spectrum in every direction
• tiny variations of the CMB temperature ΔT/T ~ 10-5
Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies help
us to answer these questions!
Huge compression of
information to a few
hundred numbers!
Planck Collaboration, 2013, paper XV
Planck all sky map
• CMB has a blackbody spectrum in every direction
• tiny variations of the CMB temperature ΔT/T ~ 10-5
CMB anisotropies clearly taught us a lot about
the Universe we live in!
1˚ (cid:15483) l ~ 200
WMAP at L2
Pie-chart of the Universe
Precision cosmology Tiny error bars!
e.g. Komatsu et al., 2011, ApJ, arXiv:1001.4538
Dunkley et al., 2011, ApJ, arXiv:1009.0866
CMB anisotropies clearly taught us a lot about
the Universe we live in!
Calabrese et al. 2013 SPT
ACT
combined TT power spectrum
Amazing consistency between different experiments!
Precision Cosmology with Planck
• Massive amount of
s
r
e
et information! (close to 30
m
a Planck papers in March 2013)
r
a
p

d
r • Impressive consistency
a
d
n
between different
a
t
S
experiments!
s
e
i • Amazing confirmation
r
a
d
n of ΛCDM
o
c
e
s

d
n
a

s
d
n
u
o
r
g
e
r
o
F
s
r
e
t
e
m
a
r
a
p

d
e
v
i
r
e
D
Planck Satellite
Planck Collaboration, 2013, paper XV
CMB Sky  Cosmology
WMAP CMB Sky
CMB Sky  Cosmology
a

l
a lm
c s
i c
er ni
h o
WMAP CMB Sky p m
S
r
a
H