CMB statistical anisotropy, multipole vectors and the influence of the dipole

Abstract

A simple algorithm which gives the multipole vectors in terms of the roots of a polynomial is given. We find that the reported alignmet of the low l multipole vectors can be summarised as an anti-alignmet of these with the dipole direction. This anti-alignment is not only present in l=2 and 3 but also for l=5 and higher. This alignment is likely due to non-linearity in the data processing. Our results are based on the three year WMAP data, we also list corresponding results for the first year data.

V2: Added references and minor changes

References in corpus (1)

• Global universe anisotropy probed by the alignment of structures in the cosmic microwave background

Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Uncorrelated Universe: Statistical Anisotropy and the Vanishing Angular Correlation Function in WMAP Years 1-3
• Testing Isotropy of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
• Alignment and signed-intensity anomalies in WMAP data
• Anomalies in the low CMB multipoles and extended foregrounds
• Anomalous CMB north-south asymmetry
• Can a primordial magnetic field originate large-scale anomalies in WMAP data?
• On the proper kinetic quadrupole CMB removal and the quadrupole anomalies
• CMB Alignment in Multi-Connected Universes
• Non-Gaussianity analysis on local morphological measures of WMAP data
• Probability Density of the Multipole Vectors for a Gaussian Cosmic Microwave Background
• On Axial and Plane--Mirror Inhomogeneities in the WMAP3 Cosmic Microwave Background Maps
• Fréchet Vectors as sensitive tools for blind tests of CMB anomalies