Speaker
Description
We use Minkowski Functionals (MF) to explore the possible presence of
non-Gaussian signatures in the recently released cosmic microwave background
(CMB) Planck maps. In particular, we investigate MF outcomes for two sets of
simulated CMB maps: one seeded by the $\Lambda$CDM concordance model, another
seeded by the 'best-fit' CMB angular power spectrum. By 'best-fit' we mean
a simulated CMB spectrum seeded by an inflationary model that well reproduce
the observed low-$\ell$ features of the CMB temperature power spectrum.
In this way, we obtain the spurious signal introduced by the power
spectra with different shapes, signal to be taken into account in the
corresponding MF analyses.
Interestingly, we investigate the response of the four MF (i.e., \textit{Area, Perimeter, Genus},
and \textit{$N_{clusters}$}) for several sets of simulated maps. Our analysis
confirm that, as already reported in the literature, the Perimeter exhibits
the best performance. Moreover, our results show that the Perimeter obtained
from the Planck maps (2015) is better fitted by the simulated CMB maps seeded
by the angular power spectrum with low-$\ell$ features with respect to the
curves obtained from the CMB maps seeded by the $\Lambda$CDM model.
