Related papers: Parity in the CMB: Space Oddity
[Abridged] We apply the multipole vector framework to full-sky maps derived from the first year WMAP data. We significantly extend our earlier work showing that the two lowest cosmologically interesting multipoles, l=2 and 3, are not…
Large patterns could exist on the microwave sky as a result of various non-standard possibilities for the large-scale Universe -- rotation or shear, non-trivial topology, and single topological defects are specific examples. All-sky (or…
Parity violation found in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is a crucial clue for the non-standard cosmological model or the possible contamination of various foreground residuals and/or calibration of the CMB data sets. In…
The anomaly against the Gaussianity in the WMAP data was alleged to be due to insufficient handling of beam asymmetries. In this paper we investigate this issue and develop a method to estimate the shape of the inflight effective beam,…
We search for hidden mirror symmetries at large angular scales in the WMAP 7 year Internal Linear Combination map of CMB temperature anisotropies using global pixel based estimators introduced for this aim. Two different axes are found for…
Bipolar spherical harmonics (BiPoSHs) provide a general formalism for quantifying departures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from statistical isotropy (SI) and from Gaussianity. However, prior work has focused only on BiPoSHs with…
[Abridged] We have produced a cleaned map of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) 3-year data using an improved foreground subtraction technique. We perform an internal linear combination (ILC) to subtract the Galactic foreground…
Weak lensing of CMB anisotropies and polarization for the power spectra and higher order statistics can be handled directly in harmonic-space without recourse to real-space correlation functions. For the power spectra, this approach not…
We test the hemispherical power asymmetry of the WMAP 7-year low-resolution temperature and polarization maps. We consider two natural estimators for such an asymmetry and exploit our implementation of an optimal angular power spectrum…
Estimation of the angular power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) on a small patch of sky is usually plagued by serious spectral leakage, specially when the map has a hard edge. Even on a full sky map, point source masks can…
We propose a novel representation of cosmic microwave anisotropy maps, where each multipole order l is represented by l unit vectors pointing in directions on the sky and an overall magnitude. These "multipole vectors and scalars" transform…
We derive the angular power spectra of intensity and polarization of Galactic synchrotron emission in the range 36 < l < 10^3 from the Parkes survey mapping the southern Galactic plane at 2.4 GHz. The polarization spectra of both electric…
We present a comparative analysis of estimators and Bayesian methods for determining the number count dipole from cosmological surveys. The increase in discordance between the number count dipole and the CMB's kinematic dipole has presented…
We perform an analysis of the CMB temperature data taken by the Planck satellite investigating if there is any significant deviation from cosmological isotropy. We look for differences in the spectrum between two opposite hemispheres and…
We constrain parity-violating interactions to the surface of last scattering using spectra from the QUaD experiment's second and third seasons of observations by searching for a possible systematic rotation of the polarization directions of…
We investigate the sources of parity asymmetry in the CMB temperature maps using a pixel domain approach. We demonstrate that this anomaly is mainly associated with the presence of two pairs of high asymmetry regions. The first pair of…
The peculiar motion of an observer with respect to the CMB rest frame induces an apparent deflection of the observed CMB photons, {\it i.e.} aberration, and a shift in their frequency, {\it i.e.} Doppler effect. Both effects distort the…
This research demonstrates that parity violation in general relativity can simultaneously explain the observed loss in power and alignment at a preferred axis ('Axis of Evil')in the low multipole moments of the WMAP data. This observational…
We present a method for measuring CMB polarization power spectra given incomplete sky coverage and test it with simulated examples such as Boomerang 2001 and MAP. By augmenting the quadratic estimator method with an additional step, we find…
Multiply connected space sections of the universe on a scale smaller than the horizon size can leave an imprint on cosmic microwave background polarization maps, in such a way that the so-called ``circles-in-the-sky'' method can be used to…