Related papers: The axis of evil - a polarization perspective
Using a variety of quantitative implementations of Occam's razor we examine the low quadrupole, the ``axis of evil'' effect and other detections recently made appealing to the excellent WMAP data. We find that some razors {\it fully}…
We present a Gaussianity test of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization by analyzing the statistics of unpolarized points in the sky, classified into three distinct types: saddles, comets, and beaks. This classification of…
The CMB polarization is the Everest in the quest to characterize the earliest photons from the Universe. After a long list of ever-decreasing upper limits, a detection of polarization was made in 2002 by the DASI team at ell =~ 500. The…
The origin of power asymmetry and other measures of statistical anisotropy on the largest scales of the universe, as manifested in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and large-scale structure data, is a long-standing open question in…
The polarized light of the cosmic microwave background is sensitive to new physics that violates parity symmetry. For example, the interaction of photons with the fields of elusive dark matter and dark energy could cause a uniform rotation…
Several of the current and next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments have polarimetric capability, promising to add to the finesse of precision cosmology. One of the contaminating Galactic foregrounds is thermal emission…
A Quadratic Maximum Likelihood (QML) estimator is applied to the WMAP 5 year low resolution maps to compute the CMB angular power spectra at large scales for both temperature and polarization. Estimates and error bars for the six angular…
Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) is a bolometric polarimeter designed to measure the inflationary B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree angular scales. During three seasons of…
Precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy have been one of the foremost concerns in modern cosmology as it provides valuable information on the cosmology of the universe. However, an accurate estimation of the…
A search for matched circle pairs of similar temperature fluctuations in the final WMAP 9yr data is carried out. Such a signature is expected if the space of the Universe is multiply connected. We investigate the relation between the pixel…
The Planck collaboration has measured the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background well enough to determine the locations of eight peaks in the temperature (TT) power spectrum, five peaks in the polarization (EE)…
Recent measurements of the temperature field of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provide tantalising evidence for violation of Statistical Isotropy (SI) that constitutes a fundamental tenet of contemporary cosmology. CMB space based…
We present an extensive frequentist analysis of the one-point statistics (number, mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis) and two-point correlation functions determined for the local extrema of the cosmic microwave background temperature…
Persistent evidence for a cosmic hemispherical asymmetry in the temperature field of cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by both WMAP as well as PLANCK increases the possibility of its cosmological origin. Presence of this signal…
The lack of power of large--angle CMB anisotropies is known to increase its statistical significance at higher Galactic latitudes, where a string--inspired pre--inflationary scale $\Delta$ can also be detected. Considering the Planck 2015…
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 the temperature and polarization angular power spectra of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) derived from the first 5 years of WMAP data. The 5-year temperature (TT) spectrum is cosmic variance limited up to multipole l=530,…
Recently, it was suggested that the map-making procedure, which is applied to the time-ordered CMB data by the WMAP team, might be flawed by hot pixels. This could lead to a bias in the pixels having an angular distance of about 141 degrees…
We report the detection of polarized anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation with the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole research station. Observations in all four Stokes…
We derive analytic expressions for the leading-order corrections to the polarization induced in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to scattering off hot electrons in galaxy clusters along the line of sight. For a thermal distribution…