Wednesday seminar: Thiago Pereira: The statistical concordance model of CMB

Careful scrutiny of CMB maps have motivated several works in which anisotropic inflation could explain known large-angle CMB anomalies. After summarizing general aspects of some of these models, I intend to make a critical review of this approach. In particular, I will argue that: 1) some anomalies are not a signature of statistical anisotropy; 2) non-gaussianity, though barely explored in this context, is equally likely to produce large-angle anomalies; 4) it's hard to assess the real statistical significance of known anomalies and 4) in the context of Lambda-CDM model, only one of the known anomalies correspond to a physical observable.