Related papers: Multiscale analysis of the CMB temperature derivat…
The full sky measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies by $\textit{WMAP}$ and $\textit{Planck}$ have highlighted the presence of several unexpected isotropy-breaking features on the largest angular…
Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings…
Thomson scattering of CMBR temperature anisotropies will cause the spectrum of the CMBR to differ from blackbody even when one resolves all anisotropies. A formalism for computing the anisotropic and inhomogeneous spectral distortions of…
The advent of high signal-to-noise cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy experiments has allowed detailed studies on the power spectrum of temperature fluctuations. The existence of acoustic oscillations in the anisotropy power…
Statistical isotropy is often assumed in cosmology and should be tested rigorously against observational data. We construct simple quadratic estimators to reconstruct asymmetry in the primordial power spectrum from CMB temperature and…
We simulate Planck observations by adopting a detailed model of the microwave sky including monopole, dipole, anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and galactic and extragalactic foregrounds. We estimate the impact of main…
Recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by the Planck Collaboration have produced arguably the most powerful observational evidence in support of the standard model of cosmology, i.e. the spatially flat $\Lambda$CDM…
Both WMAP and Planck data show a significant odd-multipole preference in the large scales of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. If this pattern originates from cosmological effects, then it can be considered a…
We present an efficient numerical code and conduct, for the first time, a null and model-independent CMB test of statistical isotropy using Multipole Vectors (MVs) at all scales. Because MVs are insensitive to the angular power spectrum…
We introduce the numbers of hot and cold spots, $n_h$ and $n_c$, of excursion sets of the CMB temperature anisotropy maps as statistical observables that can discriminate different non-Gaussian models. We numerically compute them from…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropies, as observed by independent astronomical missions such as WMAP, Planck, and most recently the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the South Pole Telescope have…
In the frame of the Solar System, the Doppler and aberration effects cause distortions in the form of mode couplings in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization power spectra and hence impose biases on the…
We propose and develop a formalism to describe and constrain statistically anisotropic primordial perturbations. Starting from a decomposition of the primordial power spectrum in spherical harmonics, we find how the temperature fluctuations…
Inflation gives rise to a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of tensor perturbations (gravitational waves), their contribution to the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) anisotropy depends upon the present cosmological parameters as well as…
Parity violation in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation has been confirmed by recent Planck observation. In this paper, we extend our previous work [P. Naselsky et al. Astrophys. J. {\bf 749}, 31 (2012)] on the directional…
The full sky cosmic microwave background polarization field can be decomposed into `electric' and `magnetic' components. Working in harmonic space we construct magnetic variables that can be measured from observations over only a portion of…
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…
Probing correlations among short and long-wavelength cosmological fluctuations is known to be decisive for deepening the current understanding of inflation at the microphysical level. Spectral distortions of the CMB can be caused by…
The two fundamental assumptions of the standard cosmological model - that the initial fluctuations are statistically isotropic and Gaussian - are rigorously tested using maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy from the…
We present the status of our study into the feasibility of estimating the parameters of inflation from planned satellite observations of the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).We describe a perturbative procedure for…