Evolution and the second law of thermodynamics (2009)
Skeptics of biological evolution often claim that evolution requires a decrease in entropy, giving rise to a conflict with the second law of thermodynamics. This argument is fallacious because it...
In future microwave background polarization experiments, particularly those that aim to characterize the B component, careful attention will have to be paid to the mixing of E and B components due to...
Phase Shift Sequences for an Adding Interferometer (2008)
Hyland, Peter, Follin, Brent, Bunn, Emory F.
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimetry has the potential to provide revolutionary advances in cosmology. Future experiments to detect the very weak B mode signal in CMB polarization maps will...
The kinematic origin of the cosmological redshift (2008)
Bunn, Emory F., Hogg, David W.
A common belief among cosmologists is that the cosmological redshift cannot be properly viewed as a Doppler shift (that is, as evidence for a recession velocity), but must instead be viewed in terms...
Bunn, Emory F., Bourdon, Austin
Several anomalies appear to be present in the large-angle cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy maps of WMAP. One of these is a lack of large-scale power. Because the data otherwise match...
A BRUTE FORCE ANALYSIS OF THE COBE DMR DATA 1 (2007)
Max Tegmark, Fohringer Ring, Emory F. Bunn
More than a dozen papers analyzing the COBE data have now appeared. We review the different techniques and compare them to a "brute force " likelihood analysis where we invert the...
Directionality in the WMAP Polarization Data (2007)
Hanson, Duncan, Scott, Douglas, Bunn, Emory F.
Polarization is the next frontier of CMB analysis, but its signal is dominated over much of the sky by foregrounds which must be carefully removed. To determine the efficacy of this cleaning it is...
Constraining f(R) Gravity as a Scalar Tensor Theory (2006)
Faulkner, Thomas, Tegmark, Max, Bunn, Emory F., Mao, Yi
We search for viable f(R) theories of gravity, making use of the equivalence between such theories and scalar-tensor gravity. We find that models can be made consistent with solar system constraints...
Systematic Errors in Cosmic Microwave Background Interferometry (2006)
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization observations will require superb control of systematic errors in order to achieve their full scientific potential, particularly in the case of attempts...
Mosaicking with cosmic microwave background interferometers (2006)
Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by interferometers offer several advantages over single-dish observations. The formalism for analyzing interferometer CMB data is well...
Scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in galaxy clusters induces a polarization signal proportional to the CMB quadrupole anisotropy at the cluster's location and look-back time....
In a microwave background polarization map that covers only part of the sky, it is impossible to separate the E and B components perfectly. This difficulty in general makes it more difficult to...
E/B decomposition of finite pixelized CMB maps (2002)
Bunn, Emory F., Zaldarriaga, Matias, Tegmark, Max
Separation of the E and B components of a microwave background polarization map or a weak lensing map is an essential step in extracting science from it, but when the map covers only part of the sky...
Detectability of Microwave Background Polarization (2001)
[NOTE: Previous versions of this paper (both on astro-ph and published in Phys. Rev. D) contain results that are in error. The power spectra C_l were normalized incorrectly by a factor of 2 pi. All...
The Meaning of Einstein's Equation (2001)
This is a brief introduction to general relativity, designed for both students and teachers of the subject. While there are many excellent expositions of general relativity, few adequately explain...
A Preferred-Direction Statistic for Sky Maps (1999)
Bunn, Emory F., Scott, Douglas
Large patterns could exist on the microwave sky as a result of various non-standard possibilities for the large-scale Universe -- rotation or shear, non-trivial topology, and single topological...
Comment on the Appropriate Null Hypothesis for Cosmological Birefringence (1997)
Eisenstein, Daniel J., Bunn, Emory F.
A recent paper (Nodland and Ralston, PRL 78, 3043, astro-ph/9704196) claims to have detected evidence for birefringence in the propagation of radio waves across cosmological distances. In order to...
Flat Spots: topological signatures of an open universe in COBE sky maps (1997)
Levin, Janna J., Barrow, John D., Bunn, Emory F., Silk, Joseph
We investigate the behaviour of light rays in an open universe with a partly periodic horn topology. The geodesics can be solved exactly and the periodic topology creates characteristic new effects...
Calculation of Cosmic Background Radiation Anisotropies and Implications (1996)
We review the physical processes that are thought to produce anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background, focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on the effects of acoustic waves in the early...
The Four-Year COBE Normalization and Large-Scale Structure (1996)
We present an analysis of the four-year data from the COBE DMR experiment. We use a Karhunen-Loeve expansion of the pixel data to calculate the normalization and goodness-of-fit of a range of models...
Four-year COBE normalization of inflationary cosmologies (1996)
Bunn, Emory F, Liddle, Andrew R, White, Martin
We supply fitting formulae enabling the normalization of slow-roll inflation models to the four-year COBE data. We fully include the effect of the gravitational wave modes, including the predicted...
How Anisotropic is our Universe? (1996)
Bunn, Emory. F., Ferreira, Pedro, Silk, Joseph
Large-scale cosmic microwave background anisotropies in homogeneous, globally anisotropic cosmologies are investigated. We perform a statistical analysis in which the four-year data from the Cosmic...
The Wiener-Filtered COBE DMR Data and Predictions for the Tenerife Experiment (1995)
Bunn, Emory F., Hoffman, Yehuda, Silk, Joseph
We apply a Wiener filter to the two-year COBE DMR data. The resulting sky map has significantly reduced noise levels compared to the raw data: the most prominent hot and cold spots are significant at...
Observational Tests of One-Bubble Open Inflationary Cosmological Models (1995)
Yamamoto, Kazuhiro, Bunn, Emory F.
Motivated by recent studies of the one-bubble inflationary scenario, simple open cold dark matter models are tested for consistency with cosmological observations. The initial perturbation spectrum...
The COBE Normalization of CMB Anisotropies (1995)
With the advent of the COBE detection of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, the study of inhomogeneous cosmology has entered a new phase. It is now possible to accurately...
COBE Constraints on Baryon Isocurvature Models (1995)
Hu, Wayne, Bunn, Emory F., Sugiyama, Naoshi
We consider Bayesian constraints on standard isocurvature baryon models from the slope and normalization of the anisotropy power spectrum detected by the COBE DMR experiment in their two year maps....
We consider Bayesian constraints on standard isocurvature baryon models from the slope and normalization of the anisotropy power spectrum detected by the COBE DMR experiment in their 2 year maps. In...
Cosmological-Constant Cold Dark Matter Models and the COBE Two-Year Sky maps (1994)
Bunn, Emory F., Sugiyama, Naoshi
We compare the two-year COBE DMR sky maps with the predictions of cosmological-constant cold dark matter models. Using a Bayesian analysis, we find that the most likely value of the cosmological...
Wiener Filtering of the COBE DMR Data (1994)
Bunn, Emory F., Fisher, Karl B., Hoffman, Yehuda, Lahav, Ofer, Silk, Joseph, Zaroubi, Saleem
We derive an optimal linear filter to suppress the noise from the COBE DMR sky maps for a given power spectrum. We then apply the filter to the first-year DMR data, after removing pixels within...