No Arabic abstract
The polarization modes of the cosmological microwave background are an invaluable source of information for cosmology, and a unique window to probe the energy scale of inflation. Extracting such information from microwave surveys requires disentangling between foreground emissions and the cosmological signal, which boils down to solving a component separation problem. Component separation techniques have been widely studied for the recovery of CMB temperature anisotropies but quite rarely for the polarization modes. In this case, most component separation techniques make use of second-order statistics to discriminate between the various components. More recent methods, which rather emphasize on the sparsity of the components in the wavelet domain, have been shown to provide low-foreground, full-sky estimate of the CMB temperature anisotropies. Building on sparsity, the present paper introduces a new component separation technique dubbed PolGMCA (Polarized Generalized Morphological Component Analysis), which refines previous work to specifically tackle the estimation of the polarized CMB maps: i) it benefits from a recently introduced sparsity-based mechanism to cope with partially correlated components, ii) it builds upon estimator aggregation techniques to further yield a better noise contamination/non-Gaussian foreground residual trade-off. The PolGMCA algorithm is evaluated on simulations of full-sky polarized microwave sky simulations using the Planck Sky Model (PSM), which show that the proposed method achieve a precise recovery of the CMB map in polarization with low noise/foreground contamination residuals. It provides improvements with respect to standard methods, especially on the galactic center where estimating the CMB is challenging.
We present in this paper the PolEMICA (Polarized Expectation-Maximization Independent Component Analysis) algorithm which is an extension to polarization of the SMICA (Spectral Matching Independent Component Analysis) temperature multi-detectors multi-components (MD-MC) component separation method (Delabrouille et al. 2003). This algorithm allows us to estimate blindly in harmonic space multiple physical components from multi-detectors polarized sky maps. Assuming a linear noisy mixture of components we are able to reconstruct jointly the anisotropies electromagnetic spectra of the components for each mode T, E and B, as well as the temperature and polarization spatial power spectra, TT, EE, BB, TE, TB and EB for each of the physical components and for the noise on each of the detectors. PolEMICA is specially developed to estimate the CMB temperature and polarization power spectra from sky observations including both CMB and foreground emissions. This has been tested intensively using as a first approach full sky simulations of the Planck satellite polarized channels for a 14-months nominal mission assuming a simplified linear sky model including CMB, and optionally Galactic synchrotron emission and a Gaussian dust emission. Finally, we have applied our algorithm to more realistic Planck full sky simulations, including synchrotron, realistic dust and free-free emissions.
We present a novel technique for Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) foreground subtraction based on the framework of blind source separation. Inspired by previous work incorporating local variation to Generalized Morphological Component Analysis (GMCA), we introduce Hierarchical GMCA (HGMCA), a Bayesian hierarchical graphical model for source separation. We test our method on $N_{rm side}=256$ simulated sky maps that include dust, synchrotron, free-free and anomalous microwave emission, and show that HGMCA reduces foreground contamination by $25%$ over GMCA in both the regions included and excluded by the Planck UT78 mask, decreases the error in the measurement of the CMB temperature power spectrum to the $0.02-0.03%$ level at $ell>200$ (and $<0.26%$ for all $ell$), and reduces correlation to all the foregrounds. We find equivalent or improved performance when compared to state-of-the-art Internal Linear Combination (ILC)-type algorithms on these simulations, suggesting that HGMCA may be a competitive alternative to foreground separation techniques previously applied to observed CMB data. Additionally, we show that our performance does not suffer when we perturb model parameters or alter the CMB realization, which suggests that our algorithm generalizes well beyond our simplified simulations. Our results open a new avenue for constructing CMB maps through Bayesian hierarchical analysis.
Key to any cosmic microwave background (CMB) analysis is the separation of the CMB from foreground contaminants. In this paper we present a novel implementation of Bayesian CMB component separation. We sample from the full posterior distribution using the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), a gradient based sampling algorithm. Alongside this, we introduce new foreground modelling approaches. We use the mean-shift algorithm to define regions on the sky, clustering according to naively estimated foreground spectral parameters. Over these regions we adopt a complete pooling model, where we assume constant spectral parameters, and a hierarchical model, where we model individual spectral parameters as being drawn from underlying hyper-distributions. We validate the algorithm against simulations of the LiteBIRD and C-BASS experiments, with an input tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r=5times 10^{-3}$. Considering multipoles $32leqellleq 121$, we are able to recover estimates for $r$. With LiteBIRD only observations, and using the complete pooling model, we recover $r=(10pm 0.6)times 10^{-3}$. For C-BASS and LiteBIRD observations we find $r=(7.0pm 0.6)times 10^{-3}$ using the complete pooling model, and $r=(5.0pm 0.4)times 10^{-3}$ using the hierarchical model. By adopting the hierarchical model we are able to eliminate biases in our cosmological parameter estimation, and obtain lower uncertainties due to the smaller Galactic emission mask that can be adopted for power spectrum estimation. Measured by the rate of effective sample generation, NUTS offers performance improvements of $sim10^3$ over using Metropolis-Hastings to fit the complete pooling model. The efficiency of NUTS allows us to fit the more sophisticated hierarchical foreground model, that would likely be intractable with non-gradient based sampling algorithms.
We present foreground-reduced CMB maps derived from the full Planck data set in both temperature and polarization. Compared to the corresponding Planck 2013 temperature sky maps, the total data volume is larger by a factor of 3.2 for frequencies between 30 and 70 GHz, and by 1.9 for frequencies between 100 and 857 GHz. In addition, systematic errors in the forms of temperature-to-polarization leakage, analogue-to-digital conversion uncertainties, and very long time constant errors have been dramatically reduced, to the extent that the cosmological polarization signal may now be robustly recovered on angular scales $ellgtrsim40$. On the very largest scales, instrumental systematic residuals are still non-negligible compared to the expected cosmological signal, and modes with $ell < 20$ are accordingly suppressed in the current polarization maps by high-pass filtering. As in 2013, four different CMB component separation algorithms are applied to these observations, providing a measure of stability with respect to algorithmic and modelling choices. The resulting polarization maps have rms instrumental noise ranging between 0.21 and 0.27$,mutextrm{K}$ averaged over 55 arcmin pixels, and between 4.5 and 6.1$,mutextrm{K}$ averaged over 3.4 arcmin pixels. The cosmological parameters derived from the analysis of temperature power spectra are in agreement at the $1sigma$ level with the Planck 2015 likelihood. Unresolved mismatches between the noise properties of the data and simulations prevent a satisfactory description of the higher-order statistical properties of the polarization maps. Thus, the primary applications of these polarization maps are those that do not require massive simulations for accurate estimation of uncertainties, for instance estimation of cross-spectra and cross-correlations, or stacking analyses.
The Internal Linear Combination (ILC) component separation method has been extensively used to extract a single component, the CMB, from the WMAP multifrequency data. We generalise the ILC approach for separating other millimetre astrophysical emissions. We construct in particular a multidimensional ILC filter, which can be used, for instance, to estimate the diffuse emission of a complex component originating from multiple correlated emissions, such as the total emission of the Galactic interstellar medium. The performance of such generalised ILC methods, implemented on a needlet frame, is tested on simulations of Planck mission observations, for which we successfully reconstruct a low noise estimate of emission from astrophysical foregrounds with vanishing CMB and SZ contamination.