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Paper   IPM / Astronomy / 13655
School of Astronomy
Title:   Scalar-Tensor Anti-Cross-Correlation does not Help to Reconcile the Tension between BICEP2 and Planck
Author(s):
 1 R. Emami 2 H. Firouzjahi 3 Y. Wang
Status:   Published
Journal: Phys. Rev. D
Year:  2014
Supported by:  IPM
Abstract:
We examine the recent proposal [1] that the anti-cross-correlation of the scalar and tensor primordial fluctuations reconciles the tension between BICEP2 and Planck observations. We show that unfortunately the contribution from the scalar-tensor correlation to the CMB temperature power spectrum vanishes once summed over the angular mode m so the tension between BICEP2 and Planck can not be reconciled. The reason is that one has to use the spin-weighted spherical harmonics when projecting fields with nonzero spins into the CMB sky. These nonzero spin-weighted spherical harmonics are subject to orthogonality conditions when summed over the angular direction and thus the desired cross-correlation between the scalar and tensor perturbations in CMB map vanishes.