Paper detail

Construction of Cosmic String Induced Temperature Anisotropy Maps with CMBFAST and Statistical Analysis

We use the publicly available code CMBFAST as modified by L. Pogosian and T. Vachaspati to simulate the effects of wiggly cosmic strings on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Using the modified CMBFAST code which takes into account vector modes and models wiggly cosmic strings by the one scale model, we go beyond the angular power spectrum to construct CMB temperature maps with resolution of a few degrees. The statistics of these maps are then studied using conventional and recently proposed statistical tests optimized for the detection of hidden temperature discontinuities induced by the Gott-Kaiser-Stebbins effect. We show however, that these realistic maps can not be distinguished in a statistically significant way from purely Gaussian maps with identical power spectrum.