2003/10/31 by Jerome Martin, Jérôme Martin, Christophe Ringeval · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Neutrino Physics Research #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.69.083515
published as Phys.Rev.D69:083515,2004 · 9 pages, 3 figures, uses RevTex 4, references added, matches published version
openalex publication_date 2004/04/20 · arxiv created 2004/05/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The possibility that the cosmic variance outliers present in the recently released Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) multipole moments are due to oscillations in the primordial power spectrum is investigated. Since the most important contribution to the WMAP likelihood originates from the outliers at a relatively small angular scale (around the first Doppler peak), special attention is paid to these in contrast with previous studies on the subject which have concentrated on the large scales outliers only (i.e., the quadrupole and octupole). As a physically motivated example, the case where the oscillations are of trans-Planckian origin is considered. It is shown that the presence of the oscillations causes an important drop in the WMAP \ensuremathχ2 of about 15. The F test reveals that such a drop has a probability less than 0.06% to occur by chance and can therefore be considered as statistically significant.