# Anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Start year
1986
Organizational Unit
Organizing institutions

### Grants related:

General
Description

The general goal of this project is to determine and characterize the spatial and spectral variations in the temperature and polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background in angular scales from several arcminutes to several degrees. The primordial matter density fluctuations which originated the structure in the matter distribution of the present Universe, left imprinted inhomogeneities in the CMB temperature distribution, that are mathematically encoded in the so-called angular power spectrum. Initially, pioneering experiments like the COBE satellite (whose results deserved the Nobel Prize on Physics 2006) or the Tenerife CMB experiment demonstrated in the 90s that the level of anisotropy was about one part in a hundred thousands at angular scales of several degrees. Obtaining CMB maps at various frequencies with sufficient sensitivity to detect structures at this level is of fundamental importance to extract information on the power spectrum of primordial density fluctuations, to prove the existence of an inflationary period in the Early Universe and to establish the ultimate nature of the dark matter and dark energy. Recently, the WMAP satellite obtained CMB maps with unprecedented sensitivity that allowed to set restrictions on a large number of cosmological parameters.

The focus of this project is to undertake measurements at gradually higher angular resolutions and sensitivities, by using different experiments that have been operative from the Teide Observatory, like the Tenerife experiment, the IAC-Bartol experiment or the JBO-IAC interferometer. More recently, the Very Small Array interferometer performed observations between 1999 and 2008. At that time the COSMOSOMAS experiment was also operative, its goal having been not only the characterization of the primary CMB anisotropies but also the study and characterization of the Galactic foreground contamination. In more recent years the activity in this project has focused in the scientific exploitation of data from the Planck satellite, and in the development, operation and exploitation of the QUIJOTE experiment. Now that the Planck mission has been completed and finished, the activity is focused in the scientific exploitation of QUIJOTE, in the development of new instrumentation for QUIJOTE, and in in the development of new experiments that are being deployed or that will be deployed at the Teide Observatory: GroundBRID, STRIP, KISS and TMS.

Principal investigator
Project staff
Collaborators
Prof.
Anthony Lasenby
Dr.
Fernando Atrio Barandela
Dr.
Enrique Martínez González
Dr.
Carlos Hernández Monteagudo
1. 6-7 june: XV QUIJOTE Scientific Meeting (IFCA, Santander)
2. July: publication of the final results (12 articles) and data from the Planck satellite.
3. 15-19 october: "CMB foregrounds for B-mode studies" conference, organised within the Radioforegrounds proyect, IV AME workshop, and XVI QUIJOTE Scientific Meeting (all these eventes were celebrated at the IAC)
4. October: installation of the dome of the GroundBIRD experiment, at the Teide Observatory.
5. December: aceptation of the third QUIJOTE scientific article (Poidevin et al. 2019)

### Related publications

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Fasano, A. et al.

12
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• Revisiting the Distance to Radio Loops I and IV Using Gaia and Radio/Optical Polarization Data

Galactic synchrotron emission exhibits large angular scale features known as radio spurs and loops. Determining the physical size of these structures is important for understanding the local interstellar structure and for modeling the Galactic magnetic field. However, the distance to these structures is either under debate or entirely unknown. We

Panopoulou, G. V. et al.

12
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• Microwave spectro-polarimetry of matter and radiation across space and time

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6
2021
• A space mission to map the entire observable universe using the CMB as a backlight

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• New horizons in cosmology with spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background

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Silk, J. et al.

6
2021
• The PICASSO map-making code: application to a simulation of the QUIJOTE northern sky survey

Map-making is an important step for the data analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. It consists of converting the data, which are typically a long, complex, and noisy collection of measurements, into a map, which is an image of the observed sky. We present in this paper a new map-making code named PICASSO (Polarization and

Guidi, F. et al.

11
2021
• Study of the thermal and nonthermal emission components in M 31: the Sardinia Radio Telescope view at 6.6 GHz

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Fatigoni, S. et al.

7
2021
• The large scale polarization explorer (LSPE) for CMB measurements: performance forecast

The measurement of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is one of the current frontiers in cosmology. In particular, the detection of the primordial divergence-free component of the polarization field, the B-mode, could reveal the presence of gravitational waves in the early Universe. The detection of such a component

8
2021
• A Forecast of the Sensitivity on the Measurement of the Optical Depth to Reionization with the GroundBIRD Experiment

We compute the expected sensitivity on measurements of optical depth to reionization for a ground-based experiment at Teide Observatory. We simulate polarized partial sky maps for the GroundBIRD experiment at the frequencies 145 and 220 GHz. We perform fits for the simulated maps with our pixel-based likelihood to extract the optical depth to

Lee, K. et al.

7
2021
• Cosmological parameter forecasts by a joint 2D tomographic approach to CMB and galaxy clustering

The cross-correlation between the cosmic microwave background (CMB) fields and matter tracers carries important cosmological information. In this paper, we forecast by a signal-to-noise ratio analysis the information contained in the cross-correlation of the CMB anisotropy fields with source counts for future cosmological observations and its

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5
2021
• Detection of spectral variations of Anomalous Microwave Emission with QUIJOTE and C-BASS

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Cepeda-Arroita, R. et al.

5
2021
• 28-40 GHz variability and polarimetry of bright compact sources in the QUIJOTE cosmological fields

We observed 51 sources in the Q-U-I JOint TEnerife (QUIJOTE) cosmological fields that were brighter than 1 Jy at 30 GHz in the Planck Point Source Catalogue (version 1), with the Very Large Array at 28-40 GHz, in order to characterize their high-radio-frequency variability and polarization properties. We find a roughly lognormal distribution of

Perrott, Yvette C. et al.

4
2021
• Fundamental physics with ESPRESSO: Towards an accurate wavelength calibration for a precision test of the fine-structure constant

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Schmidt, Tobias M. et al.

2
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• The Establishment of the Standard Cosmological Model Through Observations

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Génova-Santos, Ricardo Tanausú

6
2020
• Progress Report on the Large-Scale Polarization Explorer

The large-scale polarization explorer (LSPE) is a cosmology program for the measurement of large-scale curl-like features (B-modes) in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. Its goal is to constrain the background of inflationary gravity waves traveling through the universe at the time of matter-radiation decoupling. The two

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4
2020
• Updated Design of the CMB Polarization Experiment Satellite LiteBIRD

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1
2020
• Planck intermediate results. LVI. Detection of the CMB dipole through modulation of the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect: Eppur si muove II

The largest temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the dipole, which has been measured with increasing accuracy for more than three decades, particularly with the Planck satellite. The simplest interpretation of the dipole is that it is due to our motion with respect to the rest frame of the CMB. Since current CMB

Planck Collaboration et al.

12
2020
• Planck intermediate results. LVII. Joint Planck LFI and HFI data processing

We present the NPIPE processing pipeline, which produces calibrated frequency maps in temperature and polarization from data from the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) and High Frequency Instrument (HFI) using high-performance computers. NPIPE represents a natural evolution of previous Planck analysis efforts, and combines some of the most

Planck Collaboration et al.

11
2020
• Cosmic Amorphous Dust Model as the Origin of Anomalous Microwave Emission

We have shown that the thermal emission of the amorphous dust composed of amorphous silicate dust (a-Si) and amorphous carbon dust (a-C) provides an excellent fit both to the observed intensity and the polarization spectra of molecular clouds. The anomalous microwave emission (AME) originates from the resonance transition of the two-level systems

Nashimoto, Masashi et al.

9
2020
• GroundBIRD: A CMB Polarization Experiment with MKID Arrays

GroundBIRD is a ground-based experiment for a precise observation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarizations. To achieve high sensitivity at large angular scales, we adopt three features in this experiment: fast rotation scanning, microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID), and cold optics. The rotation scanning strategy has the

Lee, K. et al.

8
2020

### Related talks

No related talks were found.

### Related conferences

• XIX Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics "The Cosmic Microwave | Background: from quantum fluctuations to the present Universe"

Tenerife, Canary Islands
Spain
Date
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