In the standard model of cosmology, Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) sky is expected to show no symmetry preferences. Following our previous studies, we explore the presence of any particular parity preference in the latest full-mission CMB temperature maps from ESA's Planck probe. Specifically, in this work, we will probe (a)symmetry in power between even and odd multipoles of CMB via it's angular power spectrum from Planck 2015 data. Further we also assess any specific preference for mirror parity (a)symmetry, by analysing the power contained in $l+m$=even or odd mode combinations.
We present a new Planck CMB lensing-CMB temperature cross-correlation likelihood that can be used to constrain cosmology via the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect. CMB lensing is an excellent tracer of ISW, and we use the latest PR4 Planck data maps and lensing reconstruction to produce the first public Planck likelihood to constrain this signal. We demonstrate the likelihood by constraining the CMB background temperature from Planck data alone, where the ISW-lensing cross-correlation is a powerful way to break the geometric degeneracy, substantially improving constraints from the CMB and le…
Recent microwave polarization measurements from the BICEP2 experiment may reveal a long-sought signature of inflation. However, these new results appear inconsistent with the best-fit model from the Planck satellite. We suggest a particularly simple idea for reconciling these data-sets, and for explaining a wide range of phenomena on the cosmic microwave sky.
We measure the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) skewness power spectrum in $\textit{Planck}$, using frequency maps of the HFI instrument and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) component map. The two-to-one skewness power spectrum measures the cross-correlation between CMB lensing and the thermal SZ effect. We also directly measure the same cross-correlation using $\textit{Planck}$ CMB lensing map and the SZ map and compare it to the cross-correlation derived from the skewness power spectrum. We model fit the SZ power spectrum and CMB lensing-SZ cross power spectrum via the skewness power spectrum to…
We present the results of the quest for ring-type structures on the maps observed by the Planck satellite. The results show that the vicinity of one radius (γ = 0.14 radians) of the rings is distinguished. Twisting the circles into deformed ellipses gives a pronounced drop of significance with the increase of twisting.
We present a new approach to component separation in multifrequency CMB experiments by formulating the problem as that of partitioning the sky into pixel clusters such that within each pixel cluster the foregrounds have similar spectrum, using only the information available in the data. Only spectral information is used for partitioning, allowing spatially far away pixels to belong to the same cluster if their foreground properties are close. We then apply a modified internal linear combination method to each pixel cluster. Since the foregrounds have similar spectrum within each cluster, the n…
The PLANCK satellite mission has been launched the 14th of May 2009 and is dedicated to the measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in temperature and polarization. The presence of diffuse galactic polarized emission contaminates the measurement of the CMB anisotropies, in particular in polarization. Therefore a good knowledge of these emissions is needed to the accuracy required for PLANCK. In this context, we have developed and implemented a coherent 3D model of the two main polarized galactic emissions : synchrotron radiation and thermal dust. We have compared these models to t…
We reconstruct the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) lensing potential on the latest Planck CMB PR4 (NPIPE) maps, which include slightly more data than the 2018 PR3 release, and implement quadratic estimators using more optimal filtering. We increase the reconstruction signal to noise by almost $20\%$, constraining the amplitude of the CMB-marginalized lensing power spectrum in units of the Planck 2018 best-fit to $1.004 \pm 0.024$ ($68\%$ limits), which is the tightest constraint on the CMB lensing power spectrum to date. For a base $Λ$CDM cosmology we find $σ_8 Ω_m^{0.25} = 0.599\pm 0.016$ f…
A persistent signal of power asymmetry on opposite hemispheres of CMB sky was seen in full-sky temperature measurements made so far. This asymmetry was seen in microwave sky from WMAP as well as PLANCK satellites, and calls for attention the larger question of \emph{statistical isotropy}, one of the foundational principles of modern cosmology. In this work we present an analysis of polarized CMB maps from PLANCK 2015 full mission data. We apply the local variance estimator on low resolution $E-$mode maps from PLANCK 2015 polarization \texttt{Commander} solution. We find a significant hemispher…
Distribution of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) from catalogs of the BATSE and BeppoSAX space observatories relative to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data by Planck space mission is studied. Three methods were applied for data analysis: 1) a histogram of CMB signal values in GRB directions, 2) mosaic correlation maps calculated for GRB locations and CMB distribution, 3) calculation of an average response in the area of "an average population GRB" on the CMB map. A correlation between GRB locations and CMB fluctuations was discovered which can be interpreted as systematic effects in the process…
The Planck satellite has a nominal mission lifetime of 14 months allowing two complete surveys of the sky. Here we investigate the potential of an extended Planck mission of four sky surveys to constrain primordial B-mode anisotropies in the presence of dominant Galactic polarized foreground emission. An extended Planck mission is capable of powerful constraints on primordial B-modes at low multipoles, which cannot be probed by ground based or sub-orbital experiments. A tensor-scalar ratio of r=0.05 can be detected at a high significance level by an extended Planck mission and it should be pos…
We present constraints on the patchy reionization by measuring the trispectrum of the Planck 2015 cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. The patchy reionization leads to anisotropies in the CMB optical depth, and the statistics of the observed CMB anisotropies is altered. We estimate the trispectrum of the CMB temperature anisotropies to constrain spatial variation of the optical depth. We show that the measured trispectrum is consistent with that from the standard lensed CMB simulation at $2σ$. While no evidence of the patchy reionization is found in the Planck 2015 tempe…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the oldest light in the universe. It is seen today as black body radiation at a near-uniform temperature of 2.73K covering the entire sky. This radiation field is not perfectly uniform, but includes within it temperature anisotropies of order delta(T)/T ~ 10E-5. Physical processes in the early universe have left their fingerprints in these CMB anisotropies, which later grew to become the galaxies and large scale structure we see today. CMB anisotropy observations are thus a key tool for cosmology. The Planck Mission was the European Space Agency's (ESA)…
The Planck satellite experiment, which was launched the 14th of may 2009, will give an accurate measurement of the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in temperature and polarization. This measurement is polluted by the presence of diffuse galactic polarized foreground emissions. In order to obtain the level of accuracy required for the Planck mission it is necessary to deal with these foregrounds. In order to do this, have develloped and implemented coherent 3D models of the two main galactic polarized emissions : the synchrotron and thermal dust emissions. We have optimized…
While the observed nearly scale-invariant initial power spectrum is regarded as one of the favorable evidence of the standard inflationary cosmology, precision observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies also suggest possible existence of nontrivial features such as those observed around multipoles $\ell\sim120$ by WMAP. Here, we examine the Planck data and investigate the effects of these features on the cosmological parameter estimation performing the Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) analysis. We find that the features exist in the Planck data at the same position as th…
The lack of power anomaly is an intriguing feature at the largest angular scales of the CMB anisotropy temperature pattern, whose statistical significance is not strong enough to claim any new physics beyond the standard cosmological model. We revisit the former statement by also considering polarisation data. We propose a new one-dimensional estimator which takes jointly into account the information contained in the TT, TE and EE CMB spectra. By employing this estimator on Planck 2015 low-$\ell$ data, we find that a random $Λ$CDM realisation is statistically accepted at the level of $3.68 \%$…
We present a new cosmological analysis of the galaxy clusters in the Planck MMF3 cosmology sample with a cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing calibration of the cluster masses. As demonstrated by Planck, galaxy clusters detected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect offer a powerful way to constrain cosmological parameters such as $Ω_{\mathrm{m}}$ and $σ_8$. Determining the absolute cluster mass scale is, however, difficult, and some recent calibrations have yielded cosmological constraints in apparent tension with constraints in the $Λ$CDM model derived from the power spectra of the pri…
We examine the internal consistency of the Planck 2015 cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropy power spectrum. We show that tension exists between cosmological constant cold dark matter (LCDM) model parameters inferred from multipoles l<1000 (roughly those accessible to Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe), and from l>=1000, particularly the CDM density, Omega_ch^2, which is discrepant at 2.5 sigma for a Planck-motivated prior on the optical depth, tau=0.07+/-0.02. We find some parameter tensions to be larger than previously reported because of inaccuracy in the code used by …
In this article, we describe a new estimate of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) intensity map reconstructed by a joint analysis of the full Planck 2015 data (PR2) and WMAP nine-years. It provides more than a mere update of the CMB map introduced in (Bobin et al. 2014b) since it benefits from an improvement of the component separation method L-GMCA (Local-Generalized Morphological Component Analysis) that allows the efficient separation of correlated components (Bobin et al. 2015). Based on the most recent CMB data, we further confirm previous results (Bobin et al. 2014b) showing that the …
A fundamental assumption inherent in the standard Lambda+CDM Hot Big Bang (HBB) model is that photons lose energy as they are redshifted due to the expansion of the universe. We show that for the Quasi-Static Universe (QSU) model, in which photon energy is an invariant in the cosmological reference frame, the photon number density in the universe today is a factor of approximately 1600 less than in the standard model. We examine some of the consequences for a number of processes that occur during the thermal history of the early universe, including primordial nucleosynthesis, the formation of …
Residual foreground contamination by thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect from galaxy clusters in cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps propagates into the reconstructed CMB lensing field, and thus biases the intrinsic cross-correlation between CMB lensing and large-scale structure (LSS). Through stacking analysis, we show that residual tSZ contamination causes an increment of lensing convergence in the central part of the clusters and a decrement of lensing convergence in the cluster outskirts. We quantify the impact of residual tSZ contamination on cross-correlations between the Planck 20…
We compare the detection abilities for the relic gravitational waves by two kinds of forthcoming cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) experiments, space-based Planck satellite and the various ground-based experiments. Comparing with the ground-based experiments, Planck satellite can observe all the CMB power spectra in all the multipole range, but having much larger instrumental noises. We find that, for the uncertainty of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $Δr$, PolarBear (II) as a typical ground-based experiment can give much smaller value than Planck satellite. However, for the uncertainty o…
We investigate the anisotropy in cosmic microwave background Planck maps due to the coupling between its beam asymmetry and uneven scanning strategy. Introducing a pixel space estimator based on the temperature gradients, we find a highly significant (~20 σ) preference for these to point along ecliptic latitudes. We examine the scale dependence, morphology and foreground sensitivity of this anisotropy, as well as the capability of detailed Planck simulations to reproduce the effect, which is crucial for its removal, as we demonstrate in a search for the weak lensing signature of cosmic defects…
We present angular power spectra and cosmological parameter constraints derived from the Planck PR4 (NPIPE) maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background. NPIPE, released by the Planck Collaboration in 2020, is a new processing pipeline for producing calibrated frequency maps from Planck data. We have created new versions of the CamSpec likelihood using these maps and applied them to constrain LCDM and single-parameter extensions. We find excellent consistency between NPIPE and the Planck 2018 maps at the parameter level, showing that the Planck cosmology is robust to substantial changes in the mapm…
We present a novel estimate of the cosmological microwave background (CMB) map by combining the two latest full-sky microwave surveys: WMAP nine-year and Planck PR1. The joint processing benefits from a recently introduced component separation method coined "local-generalized morphological component analysis'' (LGMCA) based on the sparse distribution of the foregrounds in the wavelet domain. The proposed estimation procedure takes advantage of the IRIS 100 micron as an extra observation on the galactic center for enhanced dust removal. We show that this new CMB map presents several interesting…
The Planck mission, designed for making measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation with unprecedented accuracy and angular resolution, is expected to release its first data set in the near future. For the first time in the CMB history, extensive measurements of the CMB polarization will be made available for the entire sky. Such precise and rich data are expected to contain a great wealth of information about the Universe. The information in the CMB data is conveniently represented in terms of angular power spectra for temperature and polarization. A proper estimation of t…
A number of recent, low-redshift, lensing measurements hint at a universe in which the amplitude of lensing is lower than that predicted from the $Λ$CDM model fit to the data of the Planck CMB mission. Here we use the auto- and cross-correlation signal of unWISE galaxies and Planck CMB lensing maps to infer cosmological parameters at low redshift. In particular, we consider three unWISE samples (denoted as "blue", "green" and "red") at median redshifts $z \sim 0.6$, $1.1$ and 1.5, which fully cover the Dark Energy dominated era. Our cross-correlation measurements, with combined significance $S…
The measurement of the large-scale B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a fundamental goal of future CMB experiments. However, because of unprecedented sensitivity, future CMB experiments will be much more sensitive to any imperfect modelling of the Galactic foreground polarization in the reconstruction of the primordial B-mode signal. We compare the sensitivity to B-modes of different concepts of CMB satellite missions (LiteBIRD, COrE, COrE+, PRISM, EPIC, PIXIE) in the presence of Galactic foregrounds. In particular, we quantify the impact on the tensor-to-scalar pa…
The extensive search for deviations from Gaussianity in cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) data is very important due to the information about the very early moments of the universe encoded there. Recent analyses from Planck CMB data do not exclude the presence of non-Gaussianity of small amplitude, although they are consistent with the Gaussian hypothesis. The use of different techniques is essential to provide information about types and amplitudes of non-Gaussianities in the CMB data. In particular, we find interesting to construct an estimator based upon the combination of two pow…
The CMB temperature-redshift relation, T_CMB(z)=T_0(1+z), is a key prediction of the standard cosmology, but is violated in many non standard models. Constraining possible deviations to this law is an effective way to test the LambdaCDM paradigm and to search for hints of new physics. We have determined T_CMB(z), with a precision up to 3%, for a subsample (104 clusters) of the Planck SZ cluster catalog, at redshift in the range 0.01-- 0.94, using measurements of the spectrum of the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect obtained from Planck temperature maps at frequencies from 70 to 353 GHz. The method ado…
We present a CMB large-scale polarization dataset obtained by combining WMAP Ka, Q and V with Planck 70 GHz maps. We employ the legacy frequency maps released by the WMAP and Planck collaborations and perform our own Galactic foreground mitigation technique, which relies on Planck 353 GHz for polarized dust and on Planck 30 GHz and WMAP K for polarized synchrotron. We derive a single, optimally-noise-weighted, low-residual-foreground map and the accompanying noise covariance matrix. These are shown, through $χ^2$ analysis, to be robust over an ample collection of Galactic masks. We use this da…
We present new clean maps of the CMB temperature anisotropies (as measured by Planck) constructed with a novel internal linear combination (ILC) algorithm using directional, scale-discretised wavelets --- Scale-discretised, directional wavelet ILC or SILC. Directional wavelets, when convolved with signals on the sphere, can separate the anisotropic filamentary structures which are characteristic of both the CMB and foregrounds. Extending previous component separation methods, which use the frequency, spatial and harmonic signatures of foregrounds to separate them from the cosmological backgrou…
We present results from cross-correlating Planck CMB lensing maps with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxy lensing shape catalog and BOSS galaxy catalogs. For galaxy position vs. CMB lensing cross-correlations, we measure the convergence signal around the galaxies in configuration space, using the BOSS LOWZ ($z\sim0.30$) and CMASS ($z\sim0.57$) samples. With fixed Planck 2015 cosmology, doing a joint fit with the galaxy clustering measurement, for the LOWZ (CMASS) sample we find a galaxy bias $b_g=1.75\pm0.04$ ($1.95\pm 0.02$) and galaxy-matter cross-correlation coefficient $r_{cc}=1.0\…
We investigate the extent to which foreground cleaned CMB maps can be used to estimate the cosmological parameters at small scales. We use the SMICA method, a blind separation technique which works directly at the spectral level. In this work we focus on the small scales of the CMB angular power spectrum, which are chiefly affected by noise and extragalactic foregrounds, such as point sources. We adapt SMICA to use only cross-spectra between data maps, thus avoiding the noise bias. In this study, performed both on simulations and on Planck 2015 data, we fit for extragalactic point sources by m…
We report the results of a statistical analysis performed with the four foreground-cleaned Planck maps by means of a suitably defined {\it local-variance} estimator. Our analysis shows a clear dipolar structure in Planck's {\it variance map} pointing in the direction $(l,b) \,\simeq\, (220^{\circ},-32^{\circ})$, thus consistent with the North-South asymmetry phenomenon. Surprisingly, and contrary to previous findings, removing the CMB quadrupole and octopole makes the asymmetry stronger. Our results show a maximal statistical significance, of $98.1\%$ CL, in the scales ranging from $\ell=4$ to…
In this work, we study a direction dependent power spectrum in anisotropic Finsler space-time. We use this direction dependent power spectrum to address the low-l power observed in WMAP and PLANCK data. The angular power spectrum of the temperature fluctuations has a lower amplitude in comparison to the $Λ$CDM model in the multipole range l = 2-40. Our theoretical model gives a correction to the isotropic angular power spectrum $C^{TT}_l$ due to the breaking of the rotational invariance of the primordial power spectrum. We estimate best-fit model parameters along with the six $Λ$CDM cosmologic…
We prepare real-life Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) lensing extraction with the forthcoming Planck satellite data, by studying two systematic effects related to the foregrounds contamination: the impact of foreground residuals after a component separation on the lensed CMB map, and of removing a large contaminated region of the sky. We first use the Generalized Morphological Component Analysis (GMCA) method to perform a component separation within a simplified framework which allows a high statistics Monte-Carlo study. For the second systematic, we apply a realistic mask on the temperature …
Cosmic Birefringence (CB) is the in-vacuo rotation of the linear polarization direction of photons during propagation, caused by parity-violating extensions of Maxwell electromagnetism. We build low resolution CB angle maps using Planck Legacy and NPIPE products and provide for the first time estimates of the cross-correlation spectra $C_L^{αE}$ and $C_L^{αB}$ between the CB and the CMB polarization fields. We also provide updated CB auto-correlation spectra $C_L^{αα}$ as well as the cross-correlation $C_L^{αT}$ with the CMB temperature field. We report constraints by defining the scale-invari…
Recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) results from the Planck satellite, combined with previous CMB data and Hubble constant measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope, provide a constraint on the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom of Neff=3.62^{+0.50}_{-0.48} at 95% CL. These new measurements provide a unique opportunity to place limits on models containing relativistic species at the decoupling epoch. Here we review the bounds or the allowed parameter regions in sterile neutrino models, hadronic axion models as well as on extended dark sectors with additional light spec…
In order to better analyse the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is dominated by emission from our Galaxy, we need tools that can detect residual foregrounds in cleaned CMB maps. Galactic foregrounds introduce statistical anisotropy and directionality to the polarization pseudo-vectors of the CMB, which can be investigated by using the D statistic of Bunn and Scott. This statistic is rapidly computable and capable of investigating a broad range of data products for directionality. We demonstrate the application of this statistic to detecting foregrounds in polarizati…
CMB lensing tomography, or the cross-correlation between CMB lensing maps and large-scale structure tracers over a well-defined redshift range, has the potential to map the amplitude and growth of structure over cosmic time, provide some of the most stringent tests of gravity, and break important degeneracies between cosmological parameters. In this work, we use the unWISE galaxy catalog to provide three samples at median redshifts $z \sim 0.6, 1.1$ and 1.5, fully spanning the Dark Energy dominated era, together with the most recent Planck CMB lensing maps. We obtain a combined cross-correlati…
Planck's Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization observations are the premier dataset for constraining cosmological models. Cosmic variance limited temperature at large and intermediate scales today dominates the constraints; polarization provides additional constraining power and further scrutiny of the models. To complete this picture from Planck, ground-based experiments, such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT) continue to add temperature and polarization measurements at small scales, allowing for the extraction of competitive cosmol…
We present a first internal delensing of CMB maps, both in temperature and polarization, using the public foreground-cleaned (SMICA) Planck 2015 maps. After forming quadratic estimates of the lensing potential, we use the corresponding displacement field to undo the lensing on the same data. We build differences of the delensed spectra to the original data spectra specifically to look for delensing signatures. After taking into account reconstruction noise biases in the delensed spectra, we find an expected sharpening of the power spectrum acoustic peaks with a delensing efficiency of $29\,\%$…
Residual foreground contamination in cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps, such as the residual contamination from thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect in the direction of galaxy clusters, can bias the cross-correlation measurements between CMB and large-scale structure optical surveys. It is thus essential to quantify those residuals and, if possible, to null out SZ cluster residuals in CMB maps. We quantify for the first time the amount of SZ cluster contamination in the released Planck 2015 CMB maps through (i) the stacking of CMB maps in the direction of the clusters, and (ii) the compu…
This lecture is a sketch of the physics of the cosmic microwave background. The observed anisotropy can be divided into four main contributions: variations in the temperature and gravitational potential of the primordial plasma, Doppler effect from its motion, and a net red/blueshift the photons accumulate from traveling through evolving gravitational potentials on their way from the primordial plasma to here. These variations are due to primordial perturbations, probably caused by quantum fluctuations in the very early universe. The ongoing Planck satellite mission to observe the cosmic micro…
We study the global agreement between the most recent observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropies angular power spectra released by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Planck satellite in various cosmological models that differ by the inclusion of different combinations of additional parameters. By using the Suspiciousness statistic, we show that the global "CMB tension" between the two experiments, quantified at the Gaussian equivalent level of $\sim 2.5\,σ$ within the baseline $Λ$CDM, is reduced at the level of $1.8σ$ when the effective numbe…
We cross-correlate cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing and galaxy weak lensing maps using the Planck 2013 and 2015 data and the 154 deg^2 Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). This measurement probes large-scale structure at intermediate redshifts ~0.9, between the high- and low-redshift peaks of the CMB and CFHTLenS lensing kernels, respectively. Using the noise properties of these data sets and standard Planck 2015 LCDM cosmological parameters, we forecast a signal-to-noise ratio ~4.6 for the cross-correlation. We find that the noise level of our actual measurement …
In this work, predictions of the Ginzburg-Landau theory of dark energy (GLT) for CMB lensing are studied. We find that the time and scale dependence of the dark energy fluctuations in this semi-phenomenological model is favored by data in several ways. Firstly, unlike $Λ$CDM, $\ell\leq801$ and $\ell>801$ ranges of the CMB angular power spectrum are consistent in this framework. Secondly, the lensing amplitude $A_L$ is completely consistent with unity when GLT is confronted with CMB data, even without including CMB lensing data. Therefore lensing anomaly is absent in this model. Furthermore, th…
Non-parametric reconstruction methods, such as Gaussian process (GP) regression, provide a model-independent way of estimating an underlying function and its uncertainty from noisy data. We demonstrate how GP-reconstruction can be used as a consistency test between a given data set and a specific model by looking for structures in the residuals of the data with respect to the model's best-fit. Applying this formalism to the Planck temperature and polarisation power spectrum measurements, we test their global consistency with the predictions of the base $Λ$CDM model. Our results do not show any…
It is possible to reduce the discrepancy between the local measurement of the cosmological parameter $H_0$ and the value derived from the $Planck$ measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by considering contamination of the CMB by emission from some medium around distant extragalactic sources, such as extremely cold coarse-grain dust. Though being distant, such a medium would still be in the foreground with respect to the CMB, and, as any other foreground, it would alter the CMB power spectrum. This could contribute to the dispersion of CMB temperature fluctuations. By generating …
We examine the statistical properties of polarization maps from Planck 2018 within the patch of sky observed by the BICEP2/Keck experiment using the one point distribution function (1PDF), skewness, and kurtosis statistics. Our analysis is performed for the Q and U Stokes parameters and for the corresponding E- and B-modes of the CMB signals. We extend our analysis by studying the correlations between CMB polarization maps and residual maps (the difference between the full signal and the CMB map) for the frequency range of 100--217 GHz with both the Q/U and E/B approaches. Although all the CMB…
Large-scale anomalies have been reported in CMB data with both WMAP and Planck data. These could be due to foreground residuals and or systematic effects, though their confirmation with Planck data suggests they are not due to a problem in the WMAP or Planck pipelines. If these anomalies are in fact primordial, then understanding their origin is fundamental to either validate the standard model of cosmology or to explore new physics. We investigate three other possible issues: 1) the trade-off between minimising systematics due to foreground contamination (with a conservative mask) and minimis…
