Related papers: Testing gaussianity, homogeneity and isotropy with…
The last few years have seen a surge in excitement about measurements of statistics of the primordial fluctuations beyond the power spectrum. New ideas for precision tests of Gaussianity and statistical isotropy in the data are developing…
We describe and discuss the application of Gumbel statistics, which model extreme events, to WMAP 5-year measurements of the cosmic microwave background. We find that temperature extrema of the CMB are well modelled by the Gumbel formalism…
Recently high quality data of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies have been published. In this work we study to which extent the cosmological parameters determined by using this data depend on assumptions about the initial…
We review the topic of Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy measurements carried out by means of balloon-borne telescopes. After a short description of the experimental methodology, we outline the peculiar problems of these experiments,…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies probe the primordial density field at the edge of the observable Universe. There is a limiting precision (``cosmic variance'') with which anisotropies can determine the amplitude of primordial…
The standard cosmological model predicts statistically isotropic cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations characterized by the CMB temperature coefficients $a_{\ell m}$ being independent Gaussian random variables with zero mean and…
Cosmic microwave background observations are most commonly analyzed by estimating the power spectrum. In the limit where the CMB statistics are perfectly Gaussian, this extracts all the information, but the CMB also contains detectable…
We perform a detailed comparison of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy with the predictions of quintessence cosmological models of…
We derive a general expression for the probability of observing deviations from statistical isotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) if the primordial fluctuations are non-Gaussian and extend to superhorizon scales. The primary…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy constrains the geometry of the Universe because the positions of the acoustic peaks of the angular power spectrum depend strongly on the curvature of underlying three-dimensional space. In…
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are discussed, with particular emphasis on current ground-based experiments and on future satellite, balloon and interferometer experiments. Observational techniques and the effects of…
We review two powerful methods to test the Gaussianity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB): one based on the distribution of spherical wavelet coefficients and the other on smooth tests of goodness-of-fit. The spherical wavelet…
A central assumption in our analysis of cosmic structure is that cosmological perturbations have zero ensemble mean. This property is one of the consequences of statistically homogeneity, the invariance of correlation functions under…
The anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are computed for the half-turn space E_2 which represents a compact flat model of the Universe, i.e. one with finite volume. This model is inhomogeneous in the sense that the…
We study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies produced by cosine-type quintessence models. In our analysis, effects of the adiabatic and isocurvature fluctuations are both taken into account. For purely adiabatic fluctuations…
To minimize instrumentally induced systematic errors, cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy experiments measure temperature differences across the sky using paires of horn antennas, temperature map is recovered from temperature…
We describe our methodology for comparing the WMAP measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and other complementary data sets to theoretical models. The unprecedented quality of the WMAP data, and the tight constraints on…
We give a brief review of the physics of acoustic oscillations in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. As an example of the impact of their detection in cosmology, we show how the present data on CMB angular power spectrum on…
Previous claims of significant evidence for mirror-parity in the large-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment have been recently echoed in the first study of isotropy and…
We demonstrate that the high isotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), combined with the Copernican principle, is not sufficient to prove homogeneity of the universe -- in contrast to previous results on this subject. The crucial…