Related papers: Estimating non-gaussianity in the microwave backgr…
The observed angular correlation function of the cosmic microwave background has previously been reported to be anomalous, particularly when measured in regions of the sky uncontaminated by Galactic emission. Recent work by Efstathiou et…
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…
Two different predictions for the primordial curvature fluctuation bispectrum are compared through their effects on the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations. The first has a local form described by a single parameter f_{NL}.…
I will discuss to what degree the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be used to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity involving one tensor and two scalar fluctuations, focusing on the correlation of one $B$-mode polarization fluctuation…
We search the high-latitude portion of the COBE Differential Microwave Radiometers (DMR) 4-year sky maps for evidence of a non-Gaussian temperature distribution in the cosmic microwave background. The genus, 3-point correlation function,…
We compute the matter bispectrum in the presence of primordial local non-Gaussianity over a wide range of scales, including the very small nonlinear ones. We use the Halo Model approach, considering non-Gaussian corrections to the halo…
Since cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) and large-scale-structure (LSS) data will shortly improve dramatically with the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and Planck Surveyor, and the Anglo-Australian 2-Degree Field (2dF) and Sloan Digital…
High resolution maps of the anisotropy of the microwave sky will yield invaluable clues as to the mechanisms involved in cosmic structure formation. One fundamental question they should answer is whether the fluctuations were Gaussian…
The detection of non-Gaussianity in the CMB data would rule out a number of inflationary models. A null detection of non-Gaussianity, instead, would exclude alternative models for the early universe. Thus, a detection or non-detection of…
For those angular multipoles where cosmic variance is an issue, non-Gaussianities in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies will be hard to detect. Here, we construct explicitly the best unbiased estimator for the CMB angular…
We consider a cosmological model with non-Gaussian initial perturbations, which in principle could be generated in non-standard inflationary scenarios with two or more scalar fields. In particular we focus our attention on the model…
The generic prediction for the perturbations generated during slow--roll, single--field inflation, as they appear in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), is a flat, close--to--Gaussian spectrum. We calculate the general solution for a…
We investigate the power of geometrical estimators on detecting non-Gaussianity in the cosmic microwave background. In particular the number, eccentricity and Gaussian curvature of excursion sets above (and below) a threshold are studied.…
We present the first computation of the cosmological perturbations generated during inflation up to second order in deviations from the homogeneous background solution. Our results, which fully account for the inflaton self-interactions as…
The power spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing will be measured to sub-percent precision with upcoming surveys, enabling tight constraints on the sum of neutrino masses and other cosmological parameters. Measuring the…
Non-gaussianity in the initial conditions of the universe is one of the most powerful mechanisms to discriminate among the competing theories of the early universe. Measurements using bispectrum of cosmic microwave background anisotropies…
If cosmic inflation suffered tiny time-dependent deviations from the slow-roll regime, these would induce the existence of small scale-dependent features imprinted in the primordial spectra, with their shapes and sizes revealing information…
In our recent paper (Yadav et al. 2007) we described a fast cubic (bispectrum) estimator of the amplitude of primordial non-Gaussianity of local type, f_{NL}, from a combined analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and…
Non-linear interactions during inflation generate non-Gaussianities in the distribution of primordial curvature. In many theories, the physics is scale-invariant, such that the induced three-point function depends solely on a dimensionless…
It is likely that the observed distribution of the microwave background temperature over the sky is only one realization of the underlying random process associated with cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. If so, one…