David Kenric Hammond
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) consists of light produced in the early life of the universe. Studying the properties of small perturbations in this signal can provide information about the physics of the early universe, and is a significant research area in modern cosmology. "Cosmic strings" are topological defects in the universe that have been predicted by several physical theories that could affect the CMB signal. The existence of cosmic strings has not been confirmed, however recent work has simulated the predicted effects of strings upon the CMB signal. In this talk I will discuss the problem of detecting weak cosmic string signal mixed with the primary Gaussian anisotropies that dominate the CMB signal. We approach this as an image denoising problem, using statistical models fit to the theoretically predicted cosmic string signal.

This work is done in collaboration with Yves Wiaux and Pierre Vandergheynst.