CMB Bispectrum from Active Models of Structure Formation

Abstract

We propose a new method for a numerical computation of the angular bispectrum of the CMB anisotropies arising from active models such as cosmic topological defects, using a modified Boltzmann code based on CMBFAST. The method does not use CMB sky maps and requires moderate computational power. As a first implementation, we apply our method to a recently proposed model of simulated cosmic strings and estimate the observability of the non-Gaussian bispectrum signal. A comparison with the cosmic variance of the bispectrum estimator shows that the bispectrum for the simulated string model we used is not observable.

Comments: 7 pages, 1 figure. Substantially expanded and revised version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D