Related papers: Non-Gaussianity in WMAP 5-year CMB map seen throug…

Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), particularly when combined with other datasets, have revolutionised our knowledge of the values of the basic cosmological parameters. Here we summarize the state of…

Cosmic inflation may have led to non-Gaussian initial conditions that cannot be fully parametrised by 3- and/or 4-point functions. In this work, we discuss various strategies to search for primordial non-Gaussianity beyond polyspectra with…

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a relic radiation of the Big Bang and as such it contains a wealth of cosmological information. Statistical analyses of the CMB, in conjunction with other cosmological observables, represent some of…

We use simulated maps of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy to quantify the ability of different statistical tests to discriminate between Gaussian and non-Gaussian models. Despite the central limit theorem on large angular scales,…

We use South Pole Telescope data from 2008 and 2009 to detect the non-Gaussian signature in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) produced by gravitational lensing and to measure the power spectrum of the projected gravitational potential.…

Since cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) and large-scale-structure (LSS) data will shortly improve dramatically with the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and Planck Surveyor, and the Anglo-Australian 2-Degree Field (2dF) and Sloan Digital…

One of the most powerful tools to probe the existence of cosmic defects in the early universe is through the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. It is well known that computations with causal sources are more involved than the…

We develop a needlet approach to estimate the amplitude of general (including non-separable) bispectra and trispectra in the cosmic microwave background, and apply this to the WMAP 9-year data. We obtain estimates for the `orthogonal'…

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum is a well-known probe of the non-Gaussianity of primordial perturbations. Just as the intervening large-scale structure modifies the CMB angular power spectrum through weak gravitational…

The skew-spectrum statistic introduced by Munshi & Heavens (2010) has recently been used in studies of non-Gaussianity from diverse cosmological data sets including the detection of primary and secondary non-Gaussianity of Cosmic Microwave…

One of the most interesting explanations for the non-Gaussian Cold Spot (CS) detected in the WMAP data by Vielva et al. 2004, is that it arises from the interaction of the CMB radiation with a cosmic texture (Cruz et al. 2007b). In this…

We use cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from the 9-year WMAP release to derive constraints on monodromy inflation, which is characterized by a linear inflaton potential with a periodic modulation. We identify two possible periodic…

We present a Gaussianity analysis of the WMAP 5-year Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy data maps. We use several third order estimators based on the spherical Mexican hat wavelet. We impose constraints on the local…

The WMAP satellite has made available high quality maps of the sky in five frequency bands ranging from 22 to 94 GHz, with the main scientific objective of studying the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). These maps,…

We perform a wavelet analysis of the temperature and polarization maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) delivered by the WMAP experiment in search for a parity violating signal. Such a signal could be seeded by new physics beyond…

Anomalies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) refer to features that have been observed, mostly at large angular scales, and which show some tension with the statistical predictions of the standard $\Lambda$CDM model. In this work, we…

Non-Gaussian statistics in the distribution of large scale structure, and in temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background, can be used to constrain inflationary models. Data on the cosmic microwave background from Planck…

We extend the previously described CMB Gibbs sampling framework to allow for exact Bayesian analysis of anisotropic universe models, and apply this method to the 5-year WMAP temperature observations. This involves adding support for…

The extraction of cosmological parameters from microwave background observations relies on specific assumptions about the statistical properties of the data, in particular that the p-point distributions of temperature fluctuations are…

We present a careful frequentist analysis of one- and two-point statistics of the hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data obtained by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Our main result is the detection…