Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity Commons^™

Taller In The Saddle: Constraining Cmb Physics Using Saddle Points, Jow L. Dylan, Dagoberto Contreras, Douglas Scott, Emory F. Bunn

Physics Faculty Publications

The statistics of extremal points in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature (hot and cold spots) have been well explored in the literature, and have been used to constrain models of the early Universe. Here, we extend the study of critical points in the CMB to the set that remains after removing extrema, namely the saddle points. We perform stacks of temperature and polarization about temperature saddle points in simulations of the CMB, as well as in data from the Plancksatellite. We then compute the theoretical profile of saddle-point stacks, given the underlying power spectra of the CMB. As an …