On the Statistics of CMB Fluctuations Induced by Topological Defects

Abstract

We use the analytical model recently introduced in Ref. \cite{lp92}, to investigate the statistics of temperature fluctuations on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), induced by topological defects. The cases of cosmic strings and textures are studied. We derive analytically the characteristic function of the probability distribution for ${δT}\over T$ and use it to obtain the lowest twelve moments including the skewness and the kurtosis. The distribution function is also obtained and it is compared with the Gaussian distribution thus identifying long non-Gaussian tails. We show that for both cosmic strings and textures all odd moments (including skewness) vanish while the relative deviation from the Gaussian for even moments increases with the order of the moment. The non-Gaussian signatures of textures, derived from the distribution function and the moments, are found to be much more prominent than the corresponding signatures for strings. We discuss the physical origin of this result.