Isotropy analyses of the Planck convergence map
  The presence of matter in the path of relic photons causes distortions in the
angular pattern of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature
fluctuations, modifying their properties in a slight but measurable way.
Recently, the Planck Collaboration released the estimated convergence map, an
integrated measure of the large-scale matter distribution that produced the
weak gravitational lensing (WL) phenomenon observed in Planck CMB data. We
perform exhaustive analyses of this convergence map calculating the variance in
small and large regions of the sky, but excluding the area masked due to
galactic contaminations, and compare them with the features expected in the set
of simulated convergence maps, also released by the Planck collaboration. Our
goal is to search for sky directions or regions where the WL imprints anomalous
signatures to the variance estimator revealed through a $\chi^2$ analyses at a
statistically significant level. In the local analysis of the Planck
convergence map we identified 8 patches of the sky in disagreement, in more
than 2$\sigma$, with what is observed in the average of the simulations. In
contrast, in the large regions analysis we found no statistically significant
discrepancies, but, interestingly, the regions with the highest $\chi^2$ values
are surrounding the ecliptic poles. Thus, our results show a good agreement
with the features expected by the $\Lambda$CDM concordance model, as given by
the simulations. Yet, the outliers regions found here could suggest that the
data still contain residual contamination, like noise, due to over- or
under-estimation of systematic effects in the simulation data set.
