Abstract:
We test the statistical isotropy (SI) of the
E
-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation observed by the Planck satellite using two statistics, namely, the
α
estimator that is derived from the contour Minkowski tensor (CMT), and the directional statistic (
D
statistic). The
α
estimator provides information about the alignment of structures and can be used to infer statistical properties such as Gaussianity and SI of random fields. The
D
statistic is based on detecting preferred directionality shown by vectors defined by the field. We compute
α
and
D
statistic for the low resolution component separated SMICA
E
-mode map of CMB polarization, and compare with the values calculated using FFP10 SMICA simulations. We find good agreement between the Planck data and SMICA simulations for both
α
estimator and
D
statistic.
