TESTING FOR THE GAUSSIAN NATURE OF COSMOLOGICAL DENSITY PERTURBATIONS THROUGH THE 3-POINT TEMPERATURE CORRELATION-FUNCTION

One of the crucial aspects of density perturbations that are produced by the standard inflation scenario is that they are Gaussian where seeds produced by topological defects tend to be non-Gaussian. The three-point correlation function of the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CBR) provides a sensitive test of this aspect of the primordial density field. In this paper, this function is calculated in the general context of various allowed non-Gaussian models. It is shown that the Cosmic Background Explorer and the forthcoming South Pole and balloon CBR anisotropy data may be able to provide a crucial test of the Gaussian nature of the perturbations.