Can we detect hot/cold spots in the CMB with Minkowski Functionals?
- Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Columbia University, New York, 10027 NY (United States)
- Institut für Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, D-97074 Würzburg (Germany)
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.
- OSTI ID:
- 22280189
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2012, Issue 01; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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