Construction of cosmic string induced temperature anisotropy maps with CMBFAST and statistical analysis - art. no. 025018

We use the publicly available code CMBFAST, as modified by Pogosian and Vac haspati, to simulate the effects of wiggly cosmic strings on the cosmic mic rowave background (CMB). Using the modified CMBFAST code, which takes into account vector modes and models wiggly cosmic strings by the one-scale mode l, we go beyond the angular power spectrum to construct CMB temperature map s with a resolution of a few degrees. The statistics of these maps are then studied using conventional and recently proposed statistical tests optimiz ed for the detection of hidden temperature discontinuities induced by the G ott-Kaiser-Stebbins effect. We show, however, that these realistic maps can not be distinguished in a statistically significant way from purely Gaussia n maps with an identical power spectrum.