Related papers: Exact likelihood evaluations and foreground margin…
Using a variety of quantitative implementations of Occam's razor we examine the low quadrupole, the ``axis of evil'' effect and other detections recently made appealing to the excellent WMAP data. We find that some razors {\it fully}…
The basic cosmological parameters and the primordial power spectrum together completely specify predictions for the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy and large scale structure. Here we show how we can strongly constrain both…
Two years of microwave background observations with the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) have been combined to give a sensitive, high resolution angular power spectrum over the range 400 < l < 3500. This power spectrum has been referenced to…
The asymptotic variance of the maximum likelihood estimate is proved to decrease when the maximization is restricted to a subspace that contains the true parameter value. Maximum likelihood estimation allows a systematic fitting of…
We investigate anomalies reported in the Cosmic Microwave Background maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite on very large angular scales and discuss possible interpretations. Three independent anomalies involve…
In many cosmological inference problems, the likelihood (the probability of the observed data as a function of the unknown parameters) is unknown or intractable. This necessitates approximations and assumptions, which can lead to incorrect…
We attempt to make a direct measurement of the weak lensing signal from the WMAP 7-year data. We apply the real-space implementation of the optimal quadratic estimator on the maps produced by the W-band Differencing Assemblies. We obtain a…
Recently, in a series of works by Liu and Li (L&L), they claimed that there exists a timing asynchrony of $-25.6\,$ms between the spacecraft attitude and radiometer output timestamps in the original raw WMAP time-ordered data (TOD). L&L…
In a recent preprint ("CCC-predicted low-variance circles in the CMB sky and LCDM"), Gurzadyan and Penrose (2011) claim for the second time to find evidence for pre-Big Bang activity in the form of concentric circles of low variance in the…
We constrain several models of the early Universe that predict a statistical anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky. We make use of WMAP9 maps deconvolved with beam asymmetries. As compared to previous releases of WMAP…
We present the analysis on the quadrupole phases of the Internal Linear Combination map, ILC(I) and (III) derived by the WMAP team (1 and 3-year data release). This approach allows us to see the global trend of non-Gaussianity of the…
In recent years the goal of estimating different cosmological parameters precisely has set new challenges in the effort to accurately measure the angular power spectrum of CMB. This has required removal of foreground contamination as well…
One of the fundamental problems in extracting the cosmic microwave background signal (CMB) from millimeter/submillimeter observations is the pollution by emission from the Milky Way: synchrotron, free-free, and thermal dust emission. To…
It is discovered in our previous work that different observational systematics, e.g., errors of antenna pointing directions, asynchronous between the attitude and science data, can generate pseudo-dipole signal in full-sky maps of the…
The first-year WMAP data, in combination with any one of a number of other cosmic probes, show that we live in a flat \Lambda-dominated CDM universe with \Omega_m ~ 0.27 and \Omega_\Lambda ~ 0.73. In this model the late-time action of the…
It is widely believed that maximum likelihood estimators must be used to provide optimal estimates of power spectra. Since such estimators require require of order N_d^3 operations they are computationally prohibitive for N_d greater than a…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature distribution measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) exhibits anomalously low correlation at large angles. Quantifying the degree to which this feature in the temperature…
We compare multiple foreground-cleaning pipelines for estimating the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, using simulated maps of the planned CMB-S4 experiment within the context of the South Pole Deep Patch. To evaluate robustness, we analyze bias…
We study the Internal Linear Combination (ILC) method presented by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) science team, with the goal of determining whether it may be used for cosmological purposes, as a template-free alternative…
In the context of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data analysis, we compare the efficiency at large scale of two angular power spectrum algorithms, implementing, respectively, the quadratic maximum likelihood (QML) estimator and the…