Kavli Affiliate: Craig Hogan
| First 5 Authors: Craig Hogan, Ohkyung Kwon, Stephan S. Meyer, Nathaniel Selub, Frederick Wehlen
| Summary:
Causal relationships in conformal geometry are used to analyze angular
boundaries of cosmic microwave background (CMB) correlations. It is shown that
curvature correlations limited to timelike intervals on world lines that have
connected causal diamonds during inflation generate an angular correlation
function $C(Theta)$ of gravitationally-induced CMB anisotropy that vanishes in
a range of angular separation from $Theta= pi/2 – arcsin(1/4)$ to as far as
$Theta=3pi/4$. This model-independent symmetry is shown to agree remarkably
well with even-parity and dipole-corrected CMB correlations measured in all-sky
maps from the WMAP and Planck satellites. Realizations of the standard quantum
field theory cosmological model are shown to produce comparably small
correlation with probabilities ranging from $simeq 10^{-4.3}$ to $simeq
10^{-1.5}$, depending on the map and range of angular separation. These
measurements are interpreted as evidence for a causal symmetry based on a basic
physical principle not included in the effective field theory approximation to
cosmological quantum gravity: quantum fluctuations only generate physical
correlations of spacetime curvature within regions bounded by causal diamonds.
Theoretical implications and further cosmological tests of this interpretation
are briefly discussed.
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