Related papers: Morphological Measures of nonGaussianity in CMB Ma…
The measurements of the statistical properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations enable us to probe the physics of the very early Universe especially at the epoch of inflation. A particular interest lays on the detection…
Geometric characteristics of random fields are exploited to test the consistency of density perturbation model spectra with COBE data. These CMB maps are analyzed using the number of anisotropy hot spots and their boundary curvature. CMB…
Anisotropies in distortions to the frequency spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be created through spatially varying heating processes in the early Universe. For instance, the dissipation of small-scale acoustic modes…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a fundamental observational tool in modern cosmology. The linear polarization of the CMB provides a crucial observational tool for exploring new physics, including the inflationary paradigm and…
Temperature maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, as those obtained by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), provide one of the most precise data sets to test fundamental hypotheses of modern cosmology. One of…
We outline the expected constraints on non-Gaussianity from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with current and future experiments, focusing on both the third (f_{NL}) and fourth-order (g_{NL} and \tau_{NL}) amplitudes of the local…
In the last few decades, advances in observational cosmology have given us a standard model of cosmology. We know the content of the universe to within a few percent. With more ambitious experiments on the way, we hope to move beyond the…
We introduce new symmetry-based methods to test for isotropy in cosmic microwave background radiation. Each angular multipole is factored into unique products of power eigenvectors, related multipoles and singular values that provide 2 new…
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…
The Minkowski functionals are a mathematical tool to quantify morphological features of patterns. Some applications to the matter distribution in galaxy catalogues and N-body simulations are reviewed, with an emphasis on the effects of…
We study the effects of diffuse Galactic, far-infrared extragalactic source, and radio point source emission on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data anticipated from the MAP experiment. We focus on the correlation function…
We study the effects of instrumental systematics on the estimation of primordial non-Gaussianity using the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum from both the temperature and the polarization anisotropies. For temperature systematics…
Recent detections of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy at half-degree angular scales show considerable scatter in the reported amplitude even at similar angular resolution. We use Monte Carlo techniques to simulate the current…
We evaluate the angular bispectrum of the CMB temperature anisotropy at large angular scale due to a stochastic background of primordial magnetic fields. The shape of non-Gaussianity depends on the spectral index of the magnetic field power…
In this chapter we review the present status of the Gaussianity studies of the CMB anisotropies, including physical effects producing non-Gaussianity, methods to test it and observational constraints.
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…
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 present properties of the peaks (maxima) of the CMB anisotropies expected in flat and open CDM models. We obtain analytical expressions of several topological descriptors: mean number of maxima and the probability distribution of the…
This paper is concerned with small angular scale experiments for the observation of cosmic microwave background anisotropies. In the absence of beam, the effects of partial coverage and pixelisation are disentangled and analyzed (using…
The standard models of inflation predict statistically homogeneous and isotropic primordial fluc- tuations, which should be tested by observations. In this paper we test the statistical isotropy of the mean of the CMB temperature…