Spikes in cosmic crystallography II:: topological signature of compact flat universes

We study the topological signature of euclidean isometries in pair separations histograms (PSH) and elucidate some unsettled issues regarding distance correlations between cosmic sources in cosmic crystallography. Reducing the noise of individual PSHs using mean pair separations histograms we show how to distinguish between topological and statistical spikes. We report results of simulations that evince that topological spikes are not enough to distinguish between manifolds with the same set of Clifford translations in their covering groups, and that they are not the only signature of topology in PSHs corresponding to euclidean small universes. We also show how to evince the topological signature due to non-translational isometries. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.