12:30pm Wednesday February 10 in the 3 East Theory Conference Room
Inflation, amongst other theoretical ideas, suggests that the region of uniform curvature that we observe within our horizon is perhaps a tiny patch of an extremely complex manifold. The scale of non trivial global structure tends to be of the order of the local curvature radius. Hence, in models where the horizon is comparable that scale, one may expect nontrivial structure to be lurking around the horizon scale. The cosmic microwave anisotropy is a sensitive probe of the spatial structure of the universe on scales upto and somewhats beyond the horizon scale. In this talk I will describe a general method for computing the CMB anisotropy and hilight the generic CMB signatures of nontrivial topology and constraints from the COBE-DMR data for the example of compact hyperbolic universe and elliptical (spherical geometry) universe models.