Related papers: Scalar statistics on the sphere: application to th…
The remarkable improvement in the estimates of different cosmological parameters in recent years has been largely spearheaded by accurate measurements of the angular power spectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. This has…
The spectral variation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by WMAP was tested using foreground reduced WMAP5 data, by producing subtraction maps at the 1$^\circ$ angular resolution between the two cosmological bands of V…
We recently derived exact solutions for the scalar, vector and tensor mode functions of a single, minimally coupled scalar plus gravity in an arbitrary homogeneous and isotropic background. These solutions are applied to obtain improved…
We characterize the angular polyspectra, of arbitrary order, associated with isotropic fields defined on the sphere S^2. Our techniques rely heavily on group representation theory, and specifically on the properties of Wigner matrices and…
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectral $y$-distortion anisotropy offer a test for the statistical isotropy of the primordial density perturbations on $0.01\lesssim k{\rm Mpc}\lesssim 1$. We compute the 1-point…
In this article, we extend previous studies based on CMB spherical harmonic phases (SHP) to examine the validity of the hypothesis that the temperature field of the CMB is consistent with a Gaussian random field (GRF). The null hypothesis…
There is enormous potential to advance cosmology from statistical characterizations of cosmic microwave background sky maps. The angular power spectrum of the microwave anisotropy is a particularly important statistic. Existing algorithms…
We investigate the properties of the (complex) coefficients obtained in a spherical harmonic representation of temperature maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We study the effect of the coefficient phase only, as well as the…
Precision measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and of the clustering of large-scale structure have supposedly confirmed that the primordial density perturbation has a (nearly) scale-invariant spectrum. However…
We study different variants of the Gibbs sampler algorithm from the perspective of their applicability to the estimation of power spectra of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. These include approaches studied earlier in the…
We investigate the potential of observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure in the Universe to detect possible modifications of standard inflationary models by physics beyond the Planck…
Obtaining constraints from the largest scales of a galaxy survey is challenging due to the survey mask allowing only partial measurement of large angular modes. This scatters information from the harmonic-space 2-point function away from…
The motion of our solar system relative to the CMB rest frame leads to subtle distortions in the observed CMB sky map due to the aberration effect. Usually the corresponding peculiar velocity is determined from the CMB dipole but neglecting…
We use a temperature map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) obtained using the South Pole Telescope at 150 GHz to construct a map of the gravitational convergence to z ~ 1100, revealing the fluctuations in the projected mass density.…
The breakdown of statistical homogeneity and isotropy of cosmic perturbations is a generic feature of ultra large scale structure of the cosmos, in particular, of non trivial cosmic topology. The statistical isotropy (SI) of the Cosmic…
In this paper we present a complete computation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies up to third order from gravitational perturbations accounting for scalar, vector and tensor perturbations. We then specify our results to…
We compute numerically the scalar- and tensor-mode induced Stokes parameters of the cosmic microwave background, by taking into account the basis rotation effects. It is found that the tensor contribution to the polarization power spectrum…
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…
Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by interferometers offer several advantages over single-dish observations. The formalism for analyzing interferometer CMB data is well developed in the flat-sky approximation,…
The statistical analysis of the soon to come Planck satellite CMB data will help set tighter bounds on major cosmological parameters. On the way, a number of practical difficulties need to be tackled, notably that several other…