Title

Footprints of Statistical Anisotropies

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Christian Armendariz-Picon, Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NYFollow

Document Type

Article

Date

9-29-2005

Language

English

Disciplines

Physics

Description/Abstract

We propose and develop a formalism to describe and constrain statistically anisotropic primordial perturbations. Starting from a decomposition of the primordial power spectrum in spherical harmonics, we find how the temperature fluctuations observed in the CMB sky are directly related to the coefficients in this harmonic expansion. Although the angular power spectrum does not discriminate between statistically isotropic and anisotropic perturbations, it is possible to define analogous quadratic estimators that are direct measures of statistical anisotropy. As a simple illustration of our formalism we test for the existence of a preferred direction in the primordial perturbations using full-sky CMB maps. We do not find significant evidence supporting the existence of a dipole component in the primordial spectrum.

Additional Information

26 pages, 5 double figures. Uses RevTeX4 More information at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0509893

Recommended Citation

Armendariz-Picon, Christian, "Footprints of Statistical Anisotropies" (2005). Physics - All Scholarship. 229.
https://surface.syr.edu/phy/229

Source

Harvested from Arxiv.org