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Limits on Isocurvature Perturbations from Non-Gaussianity in WMAP Temperature Anisotropies

Astrophysics 2009-09-30 v3 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We study the effect of primordial isocurvature perturbations on non-Gaussian properties of CMB temperature anisotropies. We consider generic forms of the non-linearity of isocurvature perturbations which can be applied to a wide range of theoretical models. We derive analytical expressions for the bispectrum and the Minkowski Functionals for CMB temperature fluctuations to describe the non-Gaussianity from isocurvature perturbations. We find that the isocurvature non-Gaussianity in the quadratic isocurvature model, where the isocurvature perturbation S is written as a quadratic function of the Gaussian variable sigma, S=sigma^2-<sigma^2>, can give the same signal-to-noise as f_NL=30 even if we impose the current observational limit on the fraction of isocurvature perturbations contained in the primordial power spectrum alpha. We give constraints on isocurvature non-Gaussianity from Minkowski Functionals using WMAP 5-year data. We do not find a significant signal of the isocurvature non-Gaussianity. For the quadratic isocurvature model, we obtain a stringent upper limit on the isocurvature fraction alpha<0.070 (95% CL) for a scale invariant spectrum which is comparable to the limit obtained from the power spectrum.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.3500,
  title  = {Limits on Isocurvature Perturbations from Non-Gaussianity in WMAP Temperature Anisotropies},
  author = {Chiaki Hikage and Kazuya Koyama and Takahiko Matsubara and Tomo Takahashi and Masahide Yamaguchi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.3500},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

13 pages, 5 figures, MNRAS accepted