It has been suggested by Roukema and coworkers (hereafter R04) that the
topology of the Universe as probed by the ``matched circles'' method using the
first year release of the WMAP CMB data, might be that of the Poincar\'e
dodecahedral space (PDS) model. An excess in the correlation of the
``identified circles'' was reported by R04, for circles of angular radius of
~11 deg for a relative phase twist -36deg, hinting that this could be due to a
Clifford translation, if the hypothesized model were true.
R04 did not however specify the statistical significance of the correlation
signal.
We investigate the statistical significance of the signal using Monte Carlo
CMB simulations in a simply connected Universe, and present an updated analysis
using the three-year WMAP data. We find that our analyses of the first and
three year WMAP data provide results that are consistent with the simply
connected space at a confidence level as low as 68%.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, typo corrected/replaced to match version
published in A&