Adiabatic versus isocurvature non-Gaussianity

Chiaki Hikage, Dipak Munshi, Alan Heavens, Peter Coles

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

We study the extent to which one can distinguish primordial non-Gaussianity (NG) arising from adiabatic and isocurvature perturbations. We make a joint analysis of different NG models based on various inflationary scenarios: local-type and equilateral-type NG from adiabatic perturbations and local-type and quadratic-type NG from isocurvature perturbations together with a foreground contamination by point sources. We separate the Fisher information of the bispectrum of cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization maps by l for the skew spectrum estimator introduced by Munshi and Heavens to study the scale dependence of the signal-to-noise ratio of different NG components and their correlations. We find that the adiabatic and the isocurvature modes are strongly correlated, though the phase difference of acoustic oscillations helps to distinguish them. The correlation between local- and equilateral-type is weak, but the two isocurvature modes are too strongly correlated to be discriminated. Point source contamination, to the extent to which it can be regarded as white noise, can be almost completely separated from the primordial components for l > 100. Including correlations among the different components, we find that the errors of the NG parameters increase by 20-30 per cent for the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 5-year observation, but similar or equal to 5 per cent for Planck observations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1505-1511
Number of pages7
JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume404
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 21 May 2010

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • methods: analytical
  • methods: statistical
  • cosmic microwave background
  • early Universe
  • PRIMORDIAL NON-GAUSSIANITY
  • INFLATIONARY MODELS
  • WMAP DATA
  • PERTURBATIONS
  • ANISOTROPY
  • FLUCTUATIONS
  • TEMPERATURE
  • LIMITS

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