Computing CMB anisotropy in compact hyperbolic spaces

Abstract

The measurements of CMB anisotropy have opened up a window for probing the global topology of the universe on length scales comparable to and beyond the Hubble radius. For compact topologies, the two main effects on the CMB are: (i) the breaking of statistical isotropy in characteristic patterns determined by the photon geodesic structure of the manifold and (ii) an infrared cut-off in the power spectrum of perturbations imposed by the finite spatial extent. We present a completely general scheme using the regularized method of images for calculating CMB anisotropy in models with non-trivial topology, and apply it to the computationally challenging compact hyperbolic topologies. This new technique eliminates the need for the difficult task of spatial eigenmode decomposition on these spaces. We estimate a Bayesian probability for a selection of models by confronting the theoretical pixel-pixel temperature correlation function with the COBE-DMR data. Our results demonstrate that strong constraints on compactness arise: if the universe is small compared to the `horizon' size, correlations appear in the maps that are irreconcilable with the observations. If the universe is of comparable size, the likelihood function is very dependent upon orientation of the manifold with respect to the sky. While most orientations may be strongly ruled out, it sometimes happens that for a specific orientation the predicted correlation patterns are preferred over the conventional infinite models.