Related papers: Is the cosmic microwave background really non-Gaus…
The cosmic infrared background (CIB) is gravitationally lensed. A quadratic-estimator technique that is inherited from lensing analyses of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be applied to detect the CIB lensing effects. However, the…
The normalisation of the matter power spectrum, sigma_8, is an essential ingredient to predict the phenomenology of the low redshift universe. It has been measured using several methods, such as X-ray cluster counts, weak lensing and the…
We generalize the concept of the ordinary skew-spectrum to probe the effect of non-Gaussianity on the morphology of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps in several domains: in real-space (where they are commonly known as…
The presence of astrophysical emissions in microwave observations forces us to perform component separation to extract the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) signal. However, even in the most optimistic cases, there are still strongly…
We estimate the magnitude of the bias due to non-Gaussian extragalactic foregrounds on the optimal reconstruction of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing potential and temperature power spectra. The reconstruction is performed…
We have tested Very Small Array (VSA) observations of three regions of sky for the presence of non-Gaussianity, using high-order cumulants, Minkowski functionals, a wavelet-based test and a Bayesian joint power spectrum/non-Gaussianity…
Future searches for a gravitational-wave background using Earth-based gravitational-wave detectors might be impacted by correlated noise sources. A well known example are the Schumann resonances, which are extensively studied in the context…
Measures of the non-Gaussianity of a random field depend on how accurately one is able to measure the field. If a signal measured at a certain point is to be averaged with its surroundings, or coarse-grained, the magnitude of its…
We describe and discuss the application of Gumbel statistics, which model extreme events, to WMAP 5-year measurements of the cosmic microwave background. We find that temperature extrema of the CMB are well modelled by the Gumbel formalism…
We study observational implications of the stochastic gravitational wave background and a non-Gaussian feature of scalar perturbations on the curvaton mechanism of the generation of density/curvature fluctuations, and show that they can…
We describe different methods for estimating the bispectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background data. In particular we construct a minimum variance estimator for the flat-sky limit and compare results with previously-studied frequentist methods.…
We present Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps from the Santa Barbara HACME balloon experiment (Staren etal 2000), covering about 1150 square degrees split between two regions in the northern sky, near the stars gamma Ursae Minoris and…
It is thought that a stochastic background of gravitational waves was produced during the formation of the universe. A great deal could be learned by measuring this Cosmic Gravitational-wave Background (CGB), but detecting the CGB presents…
We introduce Koenderink filters as novel tools for statistical cosmology. Amongst several promising applications, they provide a test for the Gaussianity of random fields. We focus on this application and present some preliminary results…
General Relativity provides us with an extremely powerful tool to extract at the same time astrophysical and cosmological information from the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds (SGWBs): the cross-correlation with other cosmological…
We computed the power spectrum of weak cosmic shear in models with non-Gaussian primordial density fluctuations. Cosmological initial conditions deviating from Gaussianity have recently attracted much attention in the literature, especially…
Using analytical methods and Monte Carlo simulations, we analyze a new statistic designed to detect isolated step-like discontinuities which are coherent over large areas of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) pixel maps. Such coherent…
In order to analyze data produced by the kilometer-scale gravitational wave detectors that will begin operation early next century, one needs to develop robust statistical tools capable of extracting weak signals from the detector noise.…
As the quality of cosmological data continue to improve, it is natural to test the statistics of primordial fluctuations: are they Gaussian or non-Gaussian? I review a model which generates non-Gaussian adiabatic fluctuations from…
We study the power of several scalar quantities constructed on the sphere (presented in Monteserin et al. 2005) to detect non-Gaussianity on the temperature distribution of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The test has been performed…