Long Run Trends in the Price of Energy and Energy Services

4 p.

Divergences in the Long Run Trends in the Price of Energy and of Energy Services

32 p.

Long Run Trends in Energy-Related External Costs

30 p.

Trends in Income and Price Elasticities of Transport Demand (1850-2010)

40 p.

Fitting BICEP2 with defects, primordial gravitational waves and dust

In this work we discuss the possibility of cosmic defects being responsible for the B-mode signal measured by the BICEP2 collaboration. We also allow for the presence of other cosmological sources of B-modes such as inflationary gravitational waves and polarized dust foregrounds, which might contribute to or dominate the signal. On the one hand, we find that defects alone give a poor fit to the data points. On the other, we find that defects help to improve the fit at higher multipoles when they are considered alongside inflationary gravitational waves or polarized dust. Finally, we derive new defect constraints from models combining defects and dust. This proceeding is based on previous works [1, 2].