The Cosmic Microwave Background for Pedestrians: A Review for Particle and Nuclear Physicists

Abstract

We intend to show how fundamental science is drawn from the patterns in the temperature and polarization fields of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and thus to motivate the field of CMB research. We discuss the field's history, potential science and current status, contaminating foregrounds, detection and analysis techniques and future prospects. Throughout the review we draw comparisons to particle physics, a field that has many of the same goals and that has gone through many of the same stages.

arXiv comment34 pages, 10 figures, published by Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, Volume 57, 2007, final version here: http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1146/annurev.nucl.54.070103.181232

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Dark Energy
• Collective Neutrino Oscillations
• The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves
• Probing the First Stars and Black Holes in the Early Universe with the Dark Ages Radio Explorer (DARE)
• Observing Neutral Hydrogen Above Redshift 6: The "Global" Perspective
• Multi-state Boson Stars
• Supernova cosmology: legacy and future
• The Spectrum of the Universe
• Cosmological parameter inference with Bayesian statistics
• Where does the physics of extreme gravitational collapse reside?
• Cosmic Rays and the Search for a Lorentz Invariance Violation
• Cosmological parameters after WMAP5: forecasts for Planck and future galaxy surveys
• Optical analogues of black-hole horizons
• Physics of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy
• Impacts of Dark Stars on Reionization and Signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Direct Search for Dark Matter - Striking the Balance - and the Future
• Gravitational waves in Modified Gauss-Bonnet Gravity
• Polarization of Direct Photons from Gluon Anisotropy in Ultrarelativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• Scalar Mode Quadrupole Radiation from Astronomical Sources in $F(R)$ Modified Gravity
• Structure of virtual photon polarization in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Determining the source of phase noise: Response of a driven Duffing oscillator to low-frequency damping and resonance frequency fluctuations
• Fluctuation of the Hubble parameter