COLD DARK MATTER AND DEGREE-SCALE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPY STATISTICS AFTER COBE

We conduct a Monte Carlo simulation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy in the UCSB South Pole 1991 degree-scale experiment. We examine cold dark matter cosmology with large-scale structure seeded by the Harrison-Zel'dovich hierarchy of Gaussian-distributed primordial inhomogeneities normalized to the COBE-DMR measurement of large-angle CMB anisotropy. We find it statistically implausible (in the sense of low cumulative probability F < 5% of not measuring a cosmological deltaT/T signal) that the degree-scale cosmological CMB anisotropy predicted in such models could have escaped a detection at the level of sensitivity achieved in the South Pole 1991 experiment.