Related papers: Too few spots in the cosmic microwave background

We review aspects of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectral distortions which do not appear to have been fully explored in the literature. In particular, implications of recent evidences of heating of the intergalactic medium (IGM) by…

We propose a "feature-scattering" mechanism to explain the cosmic microwave background cold spot seen from WMAP and Planck maps. If there are hidden features in the potential of multi-field inflation, the inflationary trajectory can be…

Small temperature anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background can be sourced by density perturbations via the late-time integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. Large voids and superclusters are excellent environments to make a localized…

Cosmologists have suggested a number of intriguing hypotheses for the origin of the "WMAP cold spot", the coldest extended region seen in the CMB sky, including a very large void and a collapsing texture. Either hypothesis predicts a…

We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief period of…

Cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments generally infer a temperature fluctuation from a measured intensity fluctuation through the first term in the Taylor expansion of the Planck function, the relation between the intensity in a…

It is possible to classify pixels of a smoothed cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuation map according to their local curvature in ``hill'', ``lake'' and ``saddle'' regions. In the Gaussian case, fractional areas occupied by pixels of…

We apply spherical needlets to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 5-year cosmic microwave background (CMB) dataset, to search for imprints of non-isotropic features in the CMB sky. We use the needlets localization properties to…

We study the power asymmetry between even and odd multipoles in the multipolar expansion of CMB temperature data from WMAP, recently reported in the literature. We introduce an alternate statistic which probes this effect more sensitively.…

We present a new estimate of foreground emission in the WMAP data, using a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. The new technique delivers maps of each foreground component for a variety of foreground models, error estimates of the…

We explore the microwave anisotropies at large angular scales produced by the emission from cold and large dust grains, expected to exist in the outer parts of the Solar System, using a simple toy model for this diuse emission. Its…

Full sky maps are made in five microwave frequency bands to separate the temperature anisotropy of the CMB from foreground emission. We define masks that excise regions of high foreground emission. The effectiveness of template fits to…

We present quantitative investigations of the weak lensing effect on the two-point correlation functions of local maxima (hotspots), $\xipk(\theta)$, in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps. The lensing effect depends on the projected…

We test the asymmetry of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy jointly in temperature and polarization. We study the hemispherical asymmetry, previously found only in the temperature field, with respect to the axis identified by Hansen…

The recent Planck data on the power spectrum of temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background marginally support deviations from the $\Lambda$CDM model at several multipoles. With a view towards current and forthcoming…

WMAP observations have accurately determined the position of the first two peaks and dips in the CMB temperature power spectrum. These encode information on the ratio of the distance to the last scattering surface to the sound horizon at…

The B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a unique window into tensor perturbations from inflationary gravitational waves. Survey effects complicate the estimation and description of the power spectrum on the…

We use a temperature map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) obtained using the South Pole Telescope at 150 GHz to construct a map of the gravitational convergence to z ~ 1100, revealing the fluctuations in the projected mass density.…

We have independently measured the genus topology of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background seen in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) 3-year data. A genus analysis of the WMAP data indicates…

We test the tenet of statistical isotropy of the standard cosmological model via a homology analysis of the cosmic microwave background temperature maps. Examining small sectors of the normalized maps, we find that the results exhibit a…