Abstract
Using analytical methods and Monte Carlo simulations, we analyze new statistics designed to detect isolated step-like discontinuities which are coherent over large areas of cosmic microwave background pixel maps. Such coherent temperature discontinuities are predicted by the Kaiser-Stebbins effect to form due to long cosmic strings in our present horizon. The background of the coherent step-like seed is assumed to be a scale invariant Gaussian random field which could have been produced by a superposition of seeds on smaller scales and/or by inflationary quantum fluctuations. We find that the proposed statistics can detect the presence of a coherent discontinuity at a sensitivity level almost an order of magnitude better compared to more conventional statistics such as skewness or kurtosis.
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