Zusammenfassung
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies have and will
continue to revolutionize our understanding of cosmology. The recent discovery
of the previously predicted acoustic peaks in the power spectrum has
established a working cosmological model: a critical density universe
consisting of mainly dark matter and dark energy, which formed its structure
through gravitational instability from quantum fluctuations during an
inflationary epoch. Future observations should test this model and measure its
key cosmological parameters with unprecedented precision. The phenomenology and
cosmological implications of the acoustic peaks are developed in detail. Beyond
the peaks, the yet to be detected secondary anisotropies and polarization
present opportunities to study the physics of inflation and the dark energy.
The analysis techniques devised to extract cosmological information from
voluminous CMB data sets are outlined, given their increasing importance in
experimental cosmology as a whole.
Nutzer