Anomalies of cosmic anisotropy from holographic universality of great-circle variance

Abstract

Abstract We examine all-sky cosmic microwave background temperature maps on large angular scales to compare their consistency with two scenarios: the standard inflationary quantum picture, and a distribution constrained to have a universal variance of primordial curvature perturbations on great circles. The latter symmetry is not a property of standard quantum inflation, but may be a symmetry of holographic models with causal quantum coherence on null surfaces. Since the variation of great-circle variance is dominated by the largest angular scale modes, in the latter case the amplitude and direction of the unobserved intrinsic dipole (that is, the ℓ = 1 harmonics) can be estimated from measured ℓ = 2, 3 harmonics by minimizing the variance of great-circle variances including only ℓ = 1, 2, 3 modes. It is found that including the estimated intrinsic dipole leads to a nearly-null angular correlation function over a wide range of angles, in agreement with a null anti-hemispherical symmetry independently motivated by holographic causal arguments, but highly anomalous in standard cosmology. Simulations are used here to show that simultaneously imposing the constraints of universal great-circle variance and the vanishing of the angular correlation function over a wide range of angles tends to require patterns that are unusual in the standard picture, such as anomalously high sectorality of the ℓ = 3 components, and a close alignment of principal axes of ℓ = 2 and ℓ = 3 components, that have been previously noted on the actual sky. The precision of these results appears to be primarily limited by errors introduced by models of Galactic foregrounds.