arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to R. Fabbri.
We present the cosmological and astrophysical objectives of the SPOrt mission, which is scheduled for flying on the International Space Station (ISS) in the year 2002 with the purpose of measuring the diffuse sky polarized radiation in the microwave region. We discuss the problem of disentangling the cosmic background polarized signal from the Galactic foregrounds.
We applay the genus statistics to simulated CMB polarization maps, constructed from the secondary-ionization cosmological models in experimental situations comparable to those of forthcoming space experiments. We find that both the cosmic baryon density and the spectral index of density perturbations are strongly anicorrelated to the reionization redshift. Using the Fisher matrix approach we show that the accuracy on the spectral index and optical depth to the last scattering are improved in the case of genus statistics when comparing with the accuracy obtained from the standard power spectrum statistics.
We perform the stastistics of temperature maxima and minima in COBE-DMR 2-year maps. For power-law spectra the surface distribution of peaks implies an amplitude consistent with more conventional analyses of COBE data (for instance, we get $Q_{\rm rms-PS}=17\pm 3\ μ$K for a spectral index $% n=1),$ but not with the measured quadrupole $Q_{\rm rms}=6\pm 3\ μ$K. This provides further support for the existence an infrared cutoff in the cosmic spectrum.
We investigate the existence and meaning of a preferred length in the large-scale distribution of 60-micron IRAS sources applying three tests to the 2-dimensional distribution on the celestial sphere, involving respectively the rms fluctuation and the correlation function of the source number density, and the peak number statistics. For HDM models we find a best value lambda_0 = 45-55 h^{-1} Mpc for the peak of the spectral function P(k), close to the preferred wavelength lambda = 30-40 h^{-1} Mpc of naive single-scale perturbation models. A feature should indeed be generated in this range by the anticorrelation region of xi(r), although it is not detected by recent Fourier transform analyses of redshift catalogs. Our tests provide acceptable fits for CDM models with either Omega = 0.3-0.5 or Omega = 0.1-0.2, in agreement with results in current literature. However, the quality of such fits is less satisfactory than for HDM models, with the exception of the peak number statistics, and we are not able to find a parameter interval satisfying all of our tests simultaneously. These results may indicate that the cosmic spectrum is more complicated than the smooth shapes predicted by current theoretical models.
A phenomenological power spectrum of primordial density perturbations has been constructed by using both COBE data to probe the large wavelength region, and a double power law, locally deduced from galaxy catalogs, which describes the matter correlation function up to tens of Megaparsec. The shape of the spectrum P(k) of density fluctuations exhibits a peak that singles out a characteristic wavelength proportional to the cutoff radius R0 in the matter distribution (comparable to the distance at which matter becomes anticorrelated). {}From a least squares fit to COBE's angular correlation function we obtain R0 = 35 +- 12 Mpc/h for the correlation length, and n = 0.76 +- 0.3 for the spectral index of P(k) in the large wavelength region. The inferred scale in the spectrum is 51 +- 18 Mpc/h. This number agrees with that derived from the analysis of the correlation function of matter and with a preferred scale identified in IRAS PSC.