CMB Lensing and the WMAP Cold Spot

Abstract

Cosmologists have suggested a number of intriguing hypotheses for the origin of the "WMAP cold spot", the coldest extended region seen in the CMB sky, including a very large void and a collapsing texture. Either hypothesis predicts a distinctive CMB lensing signal. We show that the upcoming generation of high resolution CMB experiments such as ACT and SPT should be able to detect the signatures of either textures or large voids. If either signal is detected, it would have profound implications for cosmology.

5 pages, 2 figures, a bug in Fig.2 fixed

References in corpus (3)

• Extragalactic Radio Sources and the WMAP Cold Spot
• Local Voids as the Origin of Large-angle Cosmic Microwave Background Anomalies: The Effect of a Cosmological Constant
• Improved estimation of cluster mass profiles from the cosmic microwave background