A novel approach to reconstructing signals of isotropy violation from a masked CMB sky

Understand

Statistical isotropy (SI) is one of the fundamental assumptions made in cosmological model building.

• This assumption is now being rigorously tested using the almost full sky measurements of the CMB anisotropies.
• A major hurdle in any such analysis is to handle the large biases induced due to the process of masking.
• We have developed a new method of analysis, using the bipolar spherical harmonic basis functions, in which we semi-analytically evaluate the modifications to SI violation induced by the mask.