Cosmic acceleration and the theory of the microwave background

The increasing precision of cosmological datasets is opening up new opportunities to test predictions from cosmic inflation. In this work I study the impact of high precision constraints on the primordial power spectrum and show how a new generation of observations can provide impressive new tests of the slow-roll inflation paradigm, as well as produce significant discriminating power among different slow-roll models. In particular, I consider next-generation measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies and (especially) polarization. I emphasize relationships between the slope of the power spectrum and its first derivative that are nearly universal among existing slow-roll inflationary models, and show how these relationships can be tested on several scales with new observations. Among other things, the results give additional motivation for an all-out effort to measure CMB polarization.; While photons continue to travel almost freely during the matter era, changes in the expansion rate due to acceleration at late times can subtly affect their distribution. Such acceleration is posited to be due to the effects of an otherwise unobserved dark energy. Also in this work I discuss several issues that arise when trying to constrain the dark energy equation of state using correlations of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect with galaxy counts and lensing of the cosmic microwave background. These techniques are complementary to others such as galaxy shear surveys, and can use data that will already be obtained from currently planned observations. In regimes where cosmic variance and shot noise are the dominant sources of error, constraints could be made on the mean equation of state to within 0.33 and its first derivative to within 1.0. Perhaps more interesting is that the determination of dark energy parameters by these types of experiments depends strongly on the presence or absence of perturbations in the dark energy fluid.