Related papers: Testing for directionality in the Planck polarizat…
We formulate statistical isotropy of CMB anisotropy maps in its most general form. We also present a fast and orientation independent statistical method to determine deviations from statistical isotropy in CMB polarization maps. Importance…
Studies of cosmic microwave background (CMB) are often limited by foreground contamination. Foreground cleaning is performed either in harmonic or pixel space after data cuts have excluded sky areas of strong contamination. We present a…
[Abridged.] It is conceivable that no single statistical estimator can be sensitive to all forms and levels of non-Gaussianity that may be present in observed CMB data. In recent works a statistical procedure based upon the calculation of…
Minkowski Functionals (MF) are excellent tools to investigate the statistical properties of the cosmic background radiation (CMB) maps. Between their notorious advantages is the possibility to use them efficiently in patches of the CMB…
As ever-more sensitive experiments are made in the quest for primordial CMB B Modes, the number of potentially significant astrophysical contaminants becomes larger as well. Thermal emission from interplanetary dust, for example, has been…
The nominal mission maps from the Planck satellite contain a wealth of information about secondary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), including those induced by the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect and…
The Cosmological Microwave Background (CMB) is of premier importance for the cosmologists to study the birth of our universe. Unfortunately, most CMB experiments such as COBE, WMAP or Planck do not provide a direct measure of the…
The recent Planck data on the power spectrum of temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background marginally support deviations from the $\Lambda$CDM model at several multipoles. With a view towards current and forthcoming…
We study a strategy to determine miscalibrated polarization angles of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments using the observed $EB$ polarization power spectra of CMB and Galactic foreground emission. We apply the methodology of…
We use a model of polarized Galactic emission developed by the the Planck collaboration to assess the impact of foregrounds on B-mode detection at low multipoles. Our main interest is to applications of noisy polarization data and in…
We explore the possible impact of galactic and extragalactic foregrounds on measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We find that, given our present understanding of the foregrounds, they are unlikely to qualitatively affect…
Precision measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization require extreme control of instrumental systematics. In a companion paper we have presented cosmological constraints from observations with the BICEP2 and Keck Array…
The presence of astrophysical emissions in microwave observations forces us to perform component separation to extract the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) signal. However, even in the most optimistic cases, there are still strongly…
We investigate the anisotropy in cosmic microwave background Planck maps due to the coupling between its beam asymmetry and uneven scanning strategy. Introducing a pixel space estimator based on the temperature gradients, we find a highly…
The non-polarized points (NPP) of the $Q$ and $U$ Stokes parameters of the CMB can be classified according to the geometry of the polarization field. We describe a procedure to identify these points in the pixelized sky and present the…
Contamination by polarized foregrounds is one of the biggest challenges for future polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys and the potential detection of primordial $B$-modes. Future experiments, such as Simons Observatory (SO)…
One of the primary scientific targets of current and future CMB polarization experiments is the search for a stochastic background of gravity waves in the early universe. As instrumental sensitivity improves, the limiting factor will…
The Planck experiment will soon provide a very accurate measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies. This will let cosmologists determine most of the cosmological parameters with unprecedented accuracy. Future experiments will…
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…
Accurate measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy requires precise knowledge of the instrument beam. We explore how well the Planck beams will be determined from observations of planets, developing techniques that are…