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.

34 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

References in corpus (2)

• Polarization Observations with the Cosmic Background Imager
• An angular power spectrum analysis of the DRAO 1.4 GHz polarization survey: implications for CMB observations

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Physics of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy
• Direct Search for Dark Matter - Striking the Balance - and the Future
• Polarization of Direct Photons from Gluon Anisotropy in Ultrarelativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• Scalar Mode Quadrupole Radiation from Astronomical Sources in $F(R)$ Modified Gravity
• 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