CMB anisotropy of the Poincare dodecahedron

We analyse the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for the Poincare dodecahedron which is an example of a multi-connected spherical universe. We compare the temperature correlation function and the angular power spectrum for the Poincare dodecahedral universe with the first-year WMAP data and find that this multi-connected universe can explain the surprisingly low CMB anisotropy on large scales found by WMAP provided that the total energy density parameter Omega(tot) is in the range 1.016... 1.020. The ensemble average over the primordial perturbations is assumed to be the scale-invariant Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum. The circles-in-the-sky signature is studied and it is found that the signal of the six pairs of matched circles could be missed by current analyses of CMB sky maps.