Journal
JOURNAL OF COSMOLOGY AND ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS
Volume -, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP Publishing Ltd
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2012/01/048
Keywords
initial conditions and eternal universe; physics of the early universe; non-gaussianity
Funding
- Karl Mannheim
- German Research Foundation (DFG) through the Research Training Group 1147 'Theoretical Astrophysics and Particle Physics'
- Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi)
- STFC [ST/F002998/1, ST/J002798/1, ST/I002006/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/F002998/1, ST/I002006/1, ST/J002798/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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In this paper, we investigate the utility of Minkowski Functionals as a probe of cold/hot disk-like structures in the CMB. In order to construct an accurate estimator, we resolve a long-standing issue with the use of Minkowski Functionals as probes of the CMB sky - namely that of systematic differences (residuals) when numerical and analytical MF are compared. We show that such residuals are in fact by-products of binning, whereas it was originally attributed to pixelation or masking effects. We then derive a map-independent estimator that encodes the effects of binning, applicable to beyond our present work. Using this residual-free estimator, we show that small disk-like effects (as claimed by Vielva et al. [1, 2]) can be detected only when a large sample of such maps are averaged over. In other words, our estimator is noise-dominated for small disk sizes at WMAP resolution. To confirm our suspicion, we apply our estimator to the WMAP7 data to obtain a null result.
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