Published July 2003 | Version Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

The trispectrum of the cosmic microwave background on subdegree angular scales: an analysis of the BOOMERanG data

  • 1. ROR icon Sapienza University of Rome
  • 2. ROR icon University of Oxford
  • 3. ROR icon Cardiff University
  • 4. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 5. ROR icon Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics
  • 6. ROR icon Nello Carrara Institute of Applied Physics
  • 7. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 8. ROR icon Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • 9. ROR icon University of Sussex
  • 10. ROR icon Case Western Reserve University
  • 11. ROR icon University of Rome Tor Vergata
  • 12. ROR icon University of Toronto
  • 13. ROR icon National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology

Abstract

The trispectrum of the cosmic microwave background can be used to assess the level of non-Gaussianity on cosmological scales. It probes the fourth-order moment, as a function of angular scale, of the probability distribution function of fluctuations and has been shown to be sensitive to primordial non-Gaussianity, secondary anisotropies (such as the Ostriker–Vishniac effect) and systematic effects (such as astrophysical foregrounds). In this paper we develop a formalism for estimating the trispectrum from high-resolution sky maps that incorporates the impact of finite sky coverage. This leads to a series of operations applied to the data set to minimize the effects of contamination due to the Gaussian component and correlations between estimates at different scales. To illustrate the effect of the estimation process, we apply our procedure to the BOOMERanG data set and show that it is consistent with Gaussianity. This work presents the first estimation of the cosmic microwave background trispectrum on subdegree scales.

Additional Information

© 2003 RAS. Accepted 2003 March 27. Received 2003 March 26; in original form 2003 January 20. Published: 21 July 2003. GDT acknowledges financial support from the Dottorato in Astronomia dell'Università La Sapienza and from a Marie Curie pre-doctoral fellowship. MK acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science foundation. PGF acknowledges the support of the Royal Society. The BOOMERanG project has been supported by Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide, Universitá di Roma 'La Sapienza', and Agenzia Spaziale Italiana in Italy, by NASA and by NSF OPP in the US. We acknowledge the use of the HEALPix package and of the Oxford Beowulf cluster for our computations. We thank Andrew Jaffe and Alessandro Melchiorri for their helpful comments and Jonathan Patterson for his help.

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Additional details

Additional titles

Alternative title
The trispectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background on sub-degree angular scales: an analysis of the BOOMERanG data

Identifiers

Eprint ID
100999
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20200130-080407664

Related works

Funding

Dottorato in Astronomia dell'Università La Sapienza
Marie Curie Fellowship
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Royal Society
Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide (PNRA)
Universitá di Roma La Sapienza
Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI)
NASA
NSF

Dates

Created
2020-01-30
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Updated
2021-11-16
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