Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2016 / iii / Paper 210 / 2 / a / Solution

Because the scalar signal and the noise vector are independent random variables with normal distributions, their sum is a Gaussian random vector. Its expected value is zero, and the covariance matrix isThus this is a rank-one covariance spike. Each summand $X_i{X}_i^{\top }$ has expected value ${\Sigma }_S$, so $\mathbb{E}\hat{\Sigma }={\Sigma }_S$. Here the empirical matrix is an uncentered empirical second-moment matrix; because the population expected value is known to be zero, it is an unbiased estimator of the covariance matrix. The TeX's apparent factorial denominator is a transcription error.