Parity Asymmetry in the CMBR Temperature Power Spectrum

Understand

We study the power asymmetry between even and odd multipoles in the multipolar expansion of CMB temperature data from WMAP, recently reported in the literature.

• We introduce an alternate statistic which probes this effect more sensitively.
• We find that the data is highly anomalous and consistently outside $2\sigma$ significance level in the whole multipole range $l=[2,101]$.
• We examine the possibility that this asymmetry may be caused by the foreground cleaning procedure or by residual foregrounds.