Related papers: Local Pancake Defeats Axis of Evil
We investigate if the hemispherical asymmetry in the CMB is produced from "asymmetric" excited initial condition. We show that in the limit where the deviations from the Bunch-Davies vacuum is large and the scale of new physics is maximally…
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…
The first two years of COBE DMR observations of the CMB anisotropy are analyzed and compared with our previously published first year results. The results are consistent, but the addition of the second year of data increases the precision…
We continue investigation of the hidden plane-mirror symmetry in the distribution of excursion sets in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropy maps, previously noticed in the three-year data of the Wilkinson microwave…
We study statistical anisotropies generated in the observed two-point function of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations if the primordial statistics are non-Gaussian. Focusing on the dipole modulations of the anisotropies, we…
A simple algorithm which gives the multipole vectors in terms of the roots of a polynomial is given. We find that the reported alignmet of the low l multipole vectors can be summarised as an anti-alignmet of these with the dipole direction.…
Assuming that the cosmological principle holds, Maartens, Ellis and Stoeger (MES) recently constructed a detailed scheme linking anisotropies in the cosmic background radiation (CMB) with anisotropies and inhomogeneities in the large scale…
The full sky measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies by $\textit{WMAP}$ and $\textit{Planck}$ have highlighted the presence of several unexpected isotropy-breaking features on the largest angular…
Though debated, the existence of claimed large-scale anomalies in the CMB is not totally dismissed. In parallel to the debate over their statistical significance, recent work focussed on masks and secondary anisotropies as potential sources…
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…
The measurements of CMB anisotropy have opened up a window for probing the global topology of the universe on length scales comparable to and beyond the Hubble radius. For compact topologies, the two main effects on the CMB are: (1) the…
Most analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background spherical harmonic coefficients a_lm has focused on estimating the power spectrum C_l=<|a_lm|^2> rather than the coefficients themselves. We present a minimum-variance method for measuring a_lm…
In the frame of a moving observer, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuation exhibits violation of Statistical Isotropy (SI). The SI violation effect from our local motion on CMB temperature fluctuation has been measured in the…
y-type spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background allow us to detect clusters and groups of galaxies, filaments of hot gas and the non-uniformities in the warm hot intergalactic medium. Several CMB experiments (on small areas…
Measurement of the acoustic peaks of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies has been instrumental in deciding the geometry and content of the universe. Acoustic peak positions vary in different parts of the sky due…
We report results on an ``one-way light path'' laser diffraction experiment as a function of the laser beam alignment relative to the Earth's velocity vector obtained by COBE measurements of the Doppler shift in the cosmic microwave…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, such as WMAP and Planck, measure intensity anisotropies and build maps using a \emph{linearized} formula for relating them to the temperature blackbody fluctuations. However such a procedure…
We present a new and especially powerful signature of cosmic strings and other topological or non-topological defects in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We show that even if defects contribute 1% or less in the…
We investigate the weak gravitational lensing effect due to the large-scale structure of the universe on two-point correlations of local maxima ({\em hotspots}) in the 2D sky map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy.…
The WMAP and Planck observations show that the quadrupole and octopole orientations of the CMB might align with each other. We reveal that the quadrupole--octopole alignment is a natural implication of the primordial power spectrum in an…