2006/12/31 by E. Jeong, G. F. Smoot · 22 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Amplitude #Anisotropy #Astronomy #Astrophysics #CMB cold spot #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmic ray #Cosmic string #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Optics #Physics #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Sky #String (physics) #Theoretical physics #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/518556
published in The Astrophysical Journal 661(1), L1-L4 (IOP Publishing) · 9 pages, 3 figures. Revised for publication
openalex publication_date 2007/04/23 · arxiv created 2007/05/11 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2021/02/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We introduce a new technique to detect the discrete temperature steps that cosmic strings might have left in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy map. The technique provides a validity test on the pattern search of cosmic strings that could serve as the groundwork for future pattern searches. The detecting power of the technique is only constrained by two unavoidable features of CMB data: (1) the finite pixelization of the sky map and (2) the Gaussian fluctuation from instrumental noise and primordial anisotropy. We set the upper limit on the cosmic string parameter as G μ ≲ 1.6 × 10 -5 at the 95% confidence level (CL) and find that the amplitude of the temperature step has to be greater than 44 μK in order to be detected for the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ( WMAP ) 3 year data.