Spherical spaces for cosmic topology and multipole selection rules

Abstract

Spherical manifolds yield cosmic spaces with positive curvature. They result by closing pieces from the sphere used by Einstein for his initial cosmology. Harmonic analysis on the manifolds aims at explaining the observed low amplitudes at small multipole orders of the cosmic microwave background. We analyze assumptions of point symmetry and randomness for spherical spaces. There emerge four spaces named orbifolds, with low volume fraction from the sphere and sharp multipole selection rules in their eigenmodes.