Expected Lipschitz-Killing curvatures for spin random fields and other non-isotropic fields

TL;DR

This paper derives explicit formulas for the expected Lipschitz-Killing curvatures of excursion sets of non-isotropic Gaussian spin fields on the sphere, aiding cosmological data analysis.

Contribution

It provides a non-asymptotic, explicit formula for Lipschitz-Killing curvatures of spin spherical fields with respect to arbitrary metrics, extending previous asymptotic results.

Findings

Explicit formulas for Lipschitz-Killing curvatures of spin fields on SO(3)

Coherence with asymptotic results in cosmology literature

Application of general Gaussian field formulas to non-isotropic cases

Abstract

Spherical spin random fields are used to model the Cosmic Microwave Background polarization, the study of which is at the heart of modern Cosmology and will be the subject of the LITEBIRD mission, in the 2030s. Its scope is to collect datas to test the theoretical predictions of the Cosmic Inflation model. In particular, the Minkowski functionals, or the Lipschitz-Killing curvatures, of excursion sets can be used to detect deviations from Gaussianity and anisotropies of random fields, being fine descriptors of their geometry and topology. In this paper we give an explicit, non-asymptotic, formula for the expectation of the Lipshitz-Killing curvatures of the excursion set of the real part of an arbitrary left-invariant Gaussian spin spherical random field, seen as a field on $SO(3)$. Our findings are coherent with the asymptotic ones presented in Carr\'on Duque, J. et al. "Minkowski Functionals in $SO(3)$ for the spin-2 CMB polarisation field", Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (2024). We also give explicit expressions for the Adler-Taylor metric, and its curvature. We obtain such result as an application of a general formula that applies to any nondegenerate Gaussian random field defined on an arbitrary three dimensional compact Riemannian manifold. The novelty is that the Lipschitz-Killing curvatures are computed with respect to an arbitrary metric, possibly different than the Adler-Taylor metric of the field.