Constraints on Early Dark Energy from Isotropic Cosmic Birefringence.

Polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is sensitive to new physics violating parity symmetry, such as the presence of a pseudoscalar "axionlike" field. Such a field may be responsible for early dark energy (EDE), which is active prior to recombination and provides a solution to the so-called Hubble tension. The EDE field coupled to photons in a parity-violating manner would rotate the plane of linear polarization of the CMB and produce a cross-correlation power spectrum of E- and B-mode polarization fields with opposite parities.

New Extraction of the Cosmic Birefringence from the Planck 2018 Polarization Data.

We search for evidence of parity-violating physics in the Planck 2018 polarization data and report on a new measurement of the cosmic birefringence angle β. The previous measurements are limited by the systematic uncertainty in the absolute polarization angles of the Planck detectors. We mitigate this systematic uncertainty completely by simultaneously determining β and the angle miscalibration using the observed cross-correlation of the E- and B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background and the Galactic foreground emission.

A measurement of the Hubble constant from angular diameter distances to two gravitational lenses.

The local expansion rate of the Universe is parametrized by the Hubble constant, [Formula: see text], the ratio between recession velocity and distance. Different techniques lead to inconsistent estimates of [Formula: see text] Observations of Type Ia supernovae (SNe) can be used to measure [Formula: see text], but this requires an external calibrator to convert relative distances to absolute ones. We use the angular diameter distance to strong gravitational lenses as a suitable calibrator, which is only weakly sensitive to cosmological assumptions.

Non-gaussianity consistency relation for multifield inflation.

While detection of the "local form" bispectrum of primordial perturbations would rule out all single-field inflation models, multifield models would still be allowed. We show that multifield models described by the δN formalism obey an inequality between fNL and one of the local-form trispectrum amplitudes, τNL, such that τNL >1/2(6/5fN)(2) with a possible logarithmic scale dependence, provided that 2-loop terms are small. Detection of a violation of this inequality would rule out most of multifield models, challenging inflation as a mechanism for generating the primoridal perturbations.

Constraining the topology of the universe.

The first year data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe are used to place stringent constraints on the topology of the Universe. We search for pairs of circles on the sky with similar temperature patterns along each circle. We restrict the search to back-to-back circle pairs, and to nearly back-to-back circle pairs, as this covers the majority of the topologies that one might hope to detect in a nearly flat universe.