Statistical Characterization of Temperature Patterns in Anisotropic Cosmologies

TL;DR

This paper investigates methods to detect large-scale anisotropic patterns in CMB temperature maps, focusing on Bianchi cosmologies, and demonstrates their effectiveness in identifying global anisotropy.

Contribution

It introduces and tests two analytical methods for detecting non-Gaussianity and anisotropy in CMB maps within anisotropic cosmological models.

Findings

Phase correlations reveal clear anisotropy signals.

Multipole vectors indicate preferred directions.

Methods effectively diagnose global asymmetry.

Abstract

We consider the issue of characterizing the coherent large-scale patterns from CMB temperature maps in globally anisotropic cosmologies. The methods we investigate are reasonably general; the particular models we test them on are the homogeneous but anisotropic relativistic cosmologies described by the Bianchi classification. Although the temperature variations produced in these models are not stochastic, they give rise to a "non-Gaussian" distribution of temperature fluctuations over the sky that is a partial diagnostic of the model. We explore two methods for quantifying non-Gaussian and/or non-stationary fluctuation fields in order to see how they respond to the Bianchi models.We first investigate the behavior of phase correlations between the spherical harmonic modes of the maps. Then we examine the behavior of the multipole vectors of the temperature distribution which, though defined in harmonic space, can indicate the presence of a preferred direction in real space, i.e. on the 2-sphere. These methods give extremely clear signals of the presence of anisotropy when applied to the models we discuss, suggesting that they have some promise as diagnostics of the presence of global asymmetry in the Universe.