Seminar: ‘BipoSH: Structured test bed for cosmic isotropy violation’

Speaker: Tarun Souradeep (Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, India)

Venue & Time: Red Room / 3:00 PM

Abstract: The Cosmological Principle, a fundamental tenet of the ‘standard model of cosmology’, predicates a statistically isotropic distribution of fluctuations in the measured cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization sky maps. Enigmatic anomalies claimed in the WMAP and Planck CMB sky maps, and some other recent observations, could challenge the standard model. However, these claims need to be cast in an objective mathematical framework and established with statistical rigor. Bayesian inference of the underlying covariance structure of random fields on the sphere in the Bipolar Spherical Harmonic (BipoSH) representation, developed in our research program, provides such a framework. We review some recent inferences drawn from Planck data and discuss the future prospects with proposed CMB observations.