[1003.0481] The cosmic microwave background bispectrum from
Posted: March 13 2010
This is a tour de force paper in which authors cobble together a second-order perturbation code using Mathematica (publicly available here: http://icg.port.ac.uk/~pitrouc/cmbquick.htm). This allows them to calculate, for the first time, what is the CMB bispectrum induced by 2nd order perturbation theory. I have read the paper only cursorily and there are a few interesting things to note:
a) The main result is that the effective fnl, measured by future expts will be ~5. I think people have arrived to this number before, but this is the first time it has been shown explicitly.
b) 2nd perturbation theory induces spectral distortions and so results depend on what you define to be your temperature. They use something they call "bolometric temperature", defined as "temperature of the black body which carries the same energy density as the observed distribution". But it is a subtle issue. It would be interesting if one would measure deviations from black body as a function of position and then do the power-spectrum of that!
c) They use a "flat sky" approximation and claim to be a good approx for l>10... I am somewhat confused about that.
d) There is no discussion of the second order corrections to the power spectrum, at least not from my quick reading of the paper. They do make seem to make rather rough approximations when calculating power spectrum, like flat sky and thin shell, but they never show a plot of C_\ell s. The point is that corrections are probably of the order of 10^{-5}, but it'd be still interesting to show explicitly that they're negligible.
a) The main result is that the effective fnl, measured by future expts will be ~5. I think people have arrived to this number before, but this is the first time it has been shown explicitly.
b) 2nd perturbation theory induces spectral distortions and so results depend on what you define to be your temperature. They use something they call "bolometric temperature", defined as "temperature of the black body which carries the same energy density as the observed distribution". But it is a subtle issue. It would be interesting if one would measure deviations from black body as a function of position and then do the power-spectrum of that!
c) They use a "flat sky" approximation and claim to be a good approx for l>10... I am somewhat confused about that.
d) There is no discussion of the second order corrections to the power spectrum, at least not from my quick reading of the paper. They do make seem to make rather rough approximations when calculating power spectrum, like flat sky and thin shell, but they never show a plot of C_\ell s. The point is that corrections are probably of the order of 10^{-5}, but it'd be still interesting to show explicitly that they're negligible.