The Cosmic Microwave Background: State of the Art

Abstract

We review the current status of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, including a brief discussion of some basic theoretical aspects as well as a summary of anisotropy detections and CMB experiments. We focus on the description of some relevant characteristics of the microwave foregrounds, on the discussion of the different estimators proposed in the literature to detect non-Gaussianity and on outlining the bases of different reconstruction methods that have been applied to the CMB.

latex file 44 pages + 2 postscript files + 1 gif file; uses elsart.sty; some references and results added; accepted for publication in New Astronomy Reviews

References in corpus (5)

• Is the cosmic microwave background really non-Gaussian?
• The correlation of peaks in the microwave background
• The Planck Surveyor mission: astrophysical prospects
• The roughness of the last scattering surface
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• Computational Cosmology: from the Early Universe to the Large Scale Structure
• Geometrical estimators as a test of Gaussianity in the CMB
• TASI Lectures: Cosmology for String Theorists
• The Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies: open problems
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