No Arabic abstract
Scalar wavelets have been used extensively in the analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature maps. Spin needlets are a new form of (spin) wavelets which were introduced in the mathematical literature by Geller and Marinucci (2008) as a tool for the analysis of spin random fields. Here we adopt the spin needlet approach for the analysis of CMB polarization measurements. The outcome of experiments measuring the polarization of the CMB are maps of the Stokes Q and U parameters which are spin 2 quantities. Here we discuss how to transform these spin 2 maps into spin 2 needlet coefficients and outline briefly how these coefficients can be used in the analysis of CMB polarization data. We review the most important properties of spin needlets, such as localization in pixel and harmonic space and asymptotic uncorrelation. We discuss several statistical applications, including the relation of angular power spectra to the needlet coefficients, testing for non-Gaussianity on polarization data, and reconstruction of the E and B scalar maps.
We present results from an end-to-end simulation pipeline interferometric observations of cosmic microwave background polarization. We use both maximum-likelihood and Gibbs sampling techniques to estimate the power spectrum. In addition, we use Gibbs sampling for image reconstruction from interferometric visibilities. The results indicate the level to which various systematic errors (e.g., pointing errors, gain errors, beam shape errors, cross- polarization) must be controlled in order to successfully detect and characterize primordial B modes as well as other scientific goals. In addition, we show that Gibbs sampling is an effective method of image reconstruction for interferometric data in other astrophysical contexts.
We discuss Spherical Needlets and their properties. Needlets are a form of spherical wavelets which do not rely on any kind of tangent plane approximation and enjoy good localization properties in both pixel and harmonic space; moreover needlets coefficients are asymptotically uncorrelated at any fixed angular distance, which makes their use in statistical procedures very promising. In view of these properties, we believe needlets may turn out to be especially useful in the analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data on the incomplete sky, as well as of other cosmological observations. As a final advantage, we stress that the implementation of needlets is computationally very convenient and may rely completely on standard data analysis packages such as HEALPix.
We describe an efficient and exact method that enables global Bayesian analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. The method reveals the joint posterior density (or likelihood for flat priors) of the power spectrum $C_ell$ and the CMB signal. Foregrounds and instrumental parameters can be simultaneously inferred from the data. The method allows the specification of a wide range of foreground priors. We explicitly show how to propagate the non-Gaussian dependency structure of the $C_ell$ posterior through to the posterior density of the parameters. If desired, the analysis can be coupled to theoretical (cosmological) priors and can yield the posterior density of cosmological parameter estimates directly from the time-ordered data. The method does not hinge on special assumptions about the survey geometry or noise properties, etc. It is based on a Monte Carlo approach and hence parallelizes trivially. No trace or determinant evaluations are necessary. The feasibility of this approach rests on the ability to solve the systems of linear equations which arise. These are of the same size and computational complexity as the map-making equations. We describe a pre-conditioned conjugate gradient technique that solves this problem and demonstrate in a numerical example that the computational time required for each Monte Carlo sample scales as $n_p^{3/2}$ with the number of pixels $n_p$. We test our method using the COBE-DMR data and explore the non-Gaussian joint posterior density of the COBE-DMR $C_ell$ in several projections.
We compute the spectral distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization induced by non-linear effects in the Compton interactions between CMB photons and cold intergalactic electrons. This signal is of the $y$-type and is dominated by contributions arising from the reionized era. We stress that it is not shadowed by the thermal SZ effect which has no equivalent for polarization. We decompose its angular dependence into $E$- and $B$-modes, and we calculate the corresponding power spectra, both exactly and using a suitable Limber approximation that allows a simpler numerical evaluation. We find that $B$-modes are of the same order of magnitude as $E$-modes. Both spectra are relatively flat, peaking around $ell=280$, and their overall amplitude is directly related to the optical depth to reionization. Moreover, we find this effect to be one order of magnitude larger than the non-linear kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect in galaxy clusters. Finally, we discuss how to improve the detectability of our signal by cross-correlating it with other quantities sourced by the flow of intergalactic electrons.
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is an abundant source of cosmological information. However, this information is encoded in non-trivial ways in a signal that is difficult to observe. The resulting challenges in extracting this information from CMB data sets have created a new frontier. In this talk I will discuss the challenges of CMB data analysis. I review what cosmological information is contained in the CMB data and the problem of extracting it. CMB analyses can be divided into two types: ``canonical parameter extraction which seeks to obtain the best possible estimates of cosmological parameters within a pre-defined theory space and hypothesis testing which seeks to test the assumption on which the canonical tests rest. Both of these activities are fundamentally important. In addition to mining the CMB for cosmological information cosmologists would like to strengthen the analysis with data from other cosmologically interesting observations as well as physical constraints. This gives an opportunity 1) to test the results from these separate probes for concordance and 2) if concordance is established to sharpen the constraints on theory space by combining the information from these separate sources.