Related papers: Maxwell's Multipole Vectors and the CMB
We have studied the cosmic microwave background (CMB) map looking for features beyond cosmological isotropy. We began by tiling the CMB variance map (which are produced by different smoothing scales) with stripes of different sizes along…
The statistical cosmological principle states that observables on the celestial sphere are sampled from a rotationally invariant distribution. Previously certain large scale anomalies which violate this principle have been found, for…
The first observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from NASA's \emph{Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe} (WMAP) led to finding `alignment' anomalies not expected from fluctuations in the isotropic cosmological model. We study…
Several anomalies appear to be present in the large-angle cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy maps of WMAP, including the alignment of large-scale multipoles. Models in which isotropy is spontaneously broken (e.g., by a scalar…
The dipolar model \cite{Gordon:2005ai} has attracted much interest because it may phenomenologically explain the CMB hemispherical power asymmetry found in the WMAP and Planck data. Since such a model explicitly breaks isotropy at large…
Scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in galaxy clusters induces a polarization signal proportional to the CMB quadrupole anisotropy at the cluster's location and look-back time. A survey of such remote quadrupole…
Low multipoles ($l$) in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies have shown some `peculiarities' when examined since the release of the full sky CMB maps, using a variety of tests. In this paper, we concern ourselves with…
Multipole vectors and pseudoentropies provide powerful tools for a numerically fast and vivid investigation of possible statistically anisotropic, respectively non-Gaussian signs in CMB temperature fluctuations. After reviewing and linking…
The quadrupole power of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies seen in the WMAP data is puzzlingly low. In this paper we demonstrate that Minimum Variance Optimization (MVO), a technique used by many authors (including…
This paper reviews the application of a novel methodology for analysing the isotropy of the universe by probing the alignment of local structures in the CMB. The strength of the proposed methodology relies on the steerable wavelet filtering…
The connection between the dipolar modulation asymmetry and the quadrupole-octopole alignment in the CMB is studied in this work. First, a generalization of the dipolar modulation model is proposed by considering that the amplitude may…
In this article we propose a novel test for statistical anisotropy of the CMB. The test is based on the fact, that the Galactic foregrounds have a remarcably strong symmetry with respect to their antipodal points and with respect to the…
The low multipole anomalies of the Cosmic Microwave Background has received much attention during the last few years. It is still not ascertained whether these anomalies are indeed primordial or the result of systematics or foregrounds. An…
The recent three-year WMAP data have confirmed the anomaly concerning the low quadrupole amplitude compared to the best-fit \Lambda CDM prediction. We show that, allowing the large-scale spatial geometry of our universe to be…
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…
A conventional explanation of the dipole anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is in terms of the Doppler effect: our galaxy is moving with respect to CMB frame with $ \sim 600 ~ km ~ s^{-1} $. However, as the deep…
We discuss how an extended foreground of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can account for the anomalies in the low multipoles of the CMB anisotropies. The distortion needed to account for the anomalies is consistent with a cold spot…
We propose a framework for separating the information contained in the CMB multipoles, $a_{\ell m}$, into its algebraically independent components. Thus we cleanly separate information pertaining to the power spectrum, non-Gaussianity and…
A method of solving Maxwell equations in a vicinity of a multipole particle (moving along an arbitrary trajectory) is proposed. The method is based on a geometric construction of a trajectory-adapted coordinate system, which simplifies…
The low quadrupole of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), measured by COBE and confirmed by WMAP, has generated much discussion recently. We point out that the well-known correlation between temperature and polarization anisotropies of…