On the Coherence of WMAP and Planck Temperature Maps

Understand

The recent data release of ESA's Planck mission together with earlier WMAP releases provide the first opportunity to compare high resolution full sky Cosmic Microwave Background temperature anisotropy maps.

• To quantify the coherence of these maps beyond the power spectrum we introduce Generalized Phases, unit vectors in the (2l+1) dimensional representation spaces.
• For a Gaussian distribution, Generalized Phases are random and if there is non-Gaussianity, they represent most of the non-Gaussian information.
• The alignment of these unit vectors from two maps can be characterized by their angle, 0 deg expected for full coherence, and 90 deg for random vectors.