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CMB anisotropies at second order III: bispectrum from products of the first-order perturbations

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Daisuke Nittaa, Eiichiro Komatsub,c, Nicola Bartolod, Sabino Matarresed and Antonio Riottod,e

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We calculate the bispectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies induced by the second-order fluctuations in the Boltzmann equation. In this paper, which is one of a series of papers on the numerical calculation of the bispectrum from the second-order fluctuations, we consider the terms that are products of the first-order perturbations, and leave intrinsically second-order terms and perturbations in the recombination history to the subsequent papers. We show that the bispectrum has the maximum signal in the squeezed triangles, similar to the local-type primordial bispectrum, as both types generate non-linearities via products of the first-order terms in position space. However, detailed calculations show that their shapes are sufficiently different: the cross-correlation coefficient reaches 0.5 at the maximum multipole of lmax ~ 200, and then weakens to 0.3 at lmax ~ 2000. The differences in shape arise from (i) the way the acoustic oscillations affect the bispectrum, and (ii) the second-order effects not being scale-invariant. This implies that the contamination of the primordial bispectrum due to the second-order effects (from the products of the first-order terms) is small. The expected signal-to-noise ratio of the products of the first-order terms is ~ 0.4 at lmax ~ 2000 for a full-sky, cosmic variance limited experiment. We therefore conclude that the products of the first-order terms may be safely ignored in the analysis of the future CMB experiments. The expected contamination of the local-form fNL is flocalNL ~ 0.9 at lmax ~ 200, and flocalNL ~ 0.5 at lmax ~ 2000.

Keywords

CMBR theory

non-gaussianity

cosmological perturbation theory

inflation

PACS

98.70.Vc Background radiations

98.80.Cq Particle-theory and field-theory models of the early Universe (including cosmic pancakes, cosmic strings, chaotic phenomena, inflationary universe, etc.)

Subjects

Gravitation and cosmology

Astrophysics and astroparticles

Dates

Issue 05 (May 2009)

Received 5 March 2009, accepted for publication 23 April 2009

Published 26 May 2009



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