Is the CMB cold spot a gate to extra dimensions?

TL;DR

This paper proposes that the cosmic microwave background Cold Spot may be explained by brane-skyrmions, a type of topological defect in brane-world models, offering an alternative to previous GUT phase transition explanations.

Contribution

It introduces brane-skyrmions as a novel explanation for the CMB Cold Spot, linking it to extra-dimensional brane-world models and suggesting observable effects at electroweak scales.

Findings

Brane-skyrmions can account for the Cold Spot in CMB data.

The scale of these textures can be as low as the electroweak scale.

Provides an alternative to collapsing textures from GUT phase transitions.

Abstract

One of the most striking features found in the cosmic microwave background data is the presence of an anomalous Cold Spot (CS) in the temperature maps made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). This CS has been interpreted as the result of the presence of a collapsing texture, perhaps coming from some early universe Grand Unified Theory (GUT) phase transition. In this work we propose an alternative explanation based on a completely different kind of texture which appears in a natural way in a broad class of brane-world models. This type of textures known as brane-skyrmions can be understood as holes in the brane which make possible to pass through them along the extra-dimensional space. The typical scales needed for the proposed brane-skyrmions to correctly describe the observed CS can be as low as the electroweak scale.