Constraining the topology of the Universe using the polarised CMB maps

Abstract

We study the possibility for constraining the topology of the Universe by means of the matched circles statistic applied to polarised cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy maps. The advantages of using the CMB polarisation maps in studies of the topology over simply analysing the temperature data as has been done to-date are clearly demonstrated. We test our algorithm to search for pairs of matched circles on simulated CMB maps for a universe with the topology of 3-torus. It is found that the noise levels of both Planck and next generation CMB experiments data are no longer prohibitive and should be low enough to enable the use of the polarisation maps for such studies. For such experiments the minimum radius of the back-to-back matched circles which can be detected are determined. We also showed that the polarisation generated after reionisation does not have an impact on detectability of the matched circles.

10 pages, 4 figures, published in MNRAS, this research was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-08-CEXC-0002-01). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1012.3549

References in corpus (3)

• Three Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Polarization Analysis
• Extending the WMAP Bound on the Size of the Universe
• On the detectability of non-trivial topologies

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• Promise of Future Searches for Cosmic Topology
• Topology beyond the horizon: how far can it be probed?
• An Improved Diffuse Foreground Subtraction by ILC method: CMB Map and Angular Power Spectrum using Planck and WMAP Observations
• Cosmic topology. Part I. Limits on orientable Euclidean manifolds from circle searches
• Cosmic topology. Part IIa. Eigenmodes, correlation matrices, and detectability of orientable Euclidean manifolds
• Limits of the circles-in-the-sky searches in the determination of cosmic topology of nearly flat universes
• Cosmic topology. Part IIIa. Microwave background parity violation without parity-violating microphysics
• A search for concentric rings with unusual variance in the 7-year WMAP temperature maps using a fast convolution approach
• Gravitational Interaction in the Chimney Lattice Universe
• Cosmic topology. Part IIIb. Eigenmodes and correlation matrices of spin-2 perturbations in orientable Euclidean manifolds