Related papers: Testing non-Gaussianity in CMB Maps by Morphologic…
We investigate the use of wavelet transforms in detecting and characterising non-Gaussian structure in maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We apply the method to simulated maps of the Kaiser-Stebbins effect due to cosmic strings…
In order to test for non-Gaussianities with respect to scale-dependencies we use so-called surrogate maps, in which possible phase correlations of the Fourier phases of the original WMAP data and simulations, respectively, are destroyed by…
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 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…
We compare the latest results from CMB experiments at scales around $l_e \sim 150$ over different parts of the sky to test the hypothesis that they are drawn from a Gaussian distribution, as is usually assumed. Using both the diagonal and…
We present a new, model-independent approach for measuring non-Gaussianity of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy pattern. Our approach is based on the empirical distribution function of the normalized spherical harmonic…
We explore a systematic approach to the analysis of primordial non-Gaussianity using fluctuations in temperature and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Following Munshi & Heavens (2009), we define a set of power-spectra…
Weak lensing effects are known to introduce non-linear couplings in CMB temperature maps. In inflationary scenario, the primary CMB anisotropies are expected to form a 2D Gaussian map, for which, the probability distribution function of the…
We present a model-independent method to test for scale-dependent non-Gaussianities in combination with scaling indices as test statistics. Therefore, surrogate data sets are generated, in which the power spectrum of the original data is…
The identification and extraction of non-Gaussian signals is one of the main cosmological challenges facing future experimental measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature pattern. We present a generalized statistical…
The next generation of ground-based CMB experiments aim to measure temperature and polarization fluctuations up to $\ell_{\rm max} \approx 5000$ over half of the sky. Combined with Planck data on large scales, this will provide improved…
Cosmic inflation may have led to non-Gaussian initial conditions that cannot be fully parametrised by 3- and/or 4-point functions. In this work, we discuss various strategies to search for primordial non-Gaussianity beyond polyspectra with…
The nonlinear parameter measures the amplitude of primordial non-Gaussianity in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), offering a crucial test of early universe models. While standard single field inflation predicts nearly…
We discuss methods to compute maps of the CMB in models featuring active causal sources and in non-Gaussian models ofinflation. We show our large angle results as well as some preliminary results on small angles. We conclude by discussing…
[Abridged] In recent works we have proposed two new large-angle non-Gaussianity indicators based on skewness and kurtosis of patches of CMB sky-sphere, and used them to find out significant deviation from Gaussianity in frequency bands and…
The detection of primordial non-Gaussianity could provide a powerful means to test various inflationary scenarios. Although scale-invariant non-Gaussianity (often described by the $f_{NL}$ formalism) is currently best constrained by the…
Non-Gaussian distributions of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies have been proposed to reconcile the discrepancies between different experiments at half-degree scales (Coulson et al. 1994). Each experiment probes a different…
CMB anisotropies are modified by the weak lensing effect of intervening large scale structures on the photon path from the last scattering surface to the observer. This has to be accounted for when observational data of sensitive…
We present a set of formalisms for comparing, evolving and constraining primordial non-Gaussian models through the CMB bispectrum. We describe improved methods for efficient computation of the full CMB bispectrum for any general…
We search the BOOMERanG maps of the anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) for deviations from gaussianity. In this paper we focus on analysis techniques in pixel-space, and compute skewness, kurtosis and Minkowski functionals…