Two of the most commonly used tools to constrain the primordial non-Gaussianity are the bispectrum and the Minkowski functionals of cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. These two measures of non-Gaussianity in principle provide distinct (though correlated) information, but in the past constraints from them have only been loosely compared and not statistically combined. In this work we evaluate, for the first time, the covariance matrix between the local non-Gaussianity coefficient $f_{\mathrm{NL}}$ estimated through the bispectrum and Minkowski functionals. We find that the estimators are positively correlated, with correlation coefficient $r\simeq 0.3$. Using the WMAP7 data to combine the two measures and accounting for the point-source systematics, we find the combined constraint $f_{\mathrm{NL}}=37\pm 28$, which has a $\sim 20\%$ smaller error than either of the individual constraints.

• Received 25 April 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.88.041302