Determination of Cosmological Parameters by Cosmic Microwave Background

Abstract

After the sensational discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies by Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR) boarded on the Cosmic Background Explore (COBE) (Smoot et al. 1992), the number of observational data of temperature fluctuations have been rapidly increasing (see e.g., White, Scott and Silk 1994) together with the understanding of physical processes of evolution of CMB anisotropies. Nowadays, CMB anisotropies are becoming one of the key observational object in the modern cosmology. CMB anisotropies provide us direct information at last scattering surface, i.e., redshift z ≈ 1000. Since the shape of the angular power spectrum of CMB anisotropies is highly sensitive to geometry of the universe, cosmological models and cosmological parameters, i.e., density parameter Ω0, Hubble constant h which is normalized by 100km/s/Mpc, cosmological constant Λ, baryon density ΩB and so on, CMB anisotropies are expected to be a new tool to understand our universe. Moreover, we can obtain information of thermal history of the universe after recombination (through the formation of secondary fluctuations and damping of primary fluctuations), physics of clusters of galaxies (through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect) and non-linear structure of the universe (through the gravitational lensing effect) from CMB anisotropies.