Signal of Statistical Anisotropy in PLANCK Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Maps

We apply our symmetry-based Power tensor technique to test statistical isotropy in PLANCK polarization maps, viz., COMMANDER and NILC. Our preliminary analysis detects many statistically anisotropic multipoles in foreground cleaned full sky maps over a wide range of angular scales $$l=40-150$$ . We also study the effect of residual foregrounds that may still be present in the Galactic plane using the polarization masks. We further probed the data for any coherent alignments across multipoles in several bins from the chosen multipole range.