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ABSTRACT: We report the results from the second flight of QMAP, an experiment to map the cosmic microwave background near the north celestial pole. We present maps of the sky at 31 and 42 GHz as well as a measurement of the angular power spectrum covering 40l200. Anisotropy is detected at 20 σ and is in agreement with previous results at these angular scales. We also report details of the data reduction and analysis techniques that were used for both flights of QMAP.
The Astrophysical Journal 01/2009; 509(2):L73. · 6.02 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: We report on the first flight of the balloon-borne QMAP experiment. The experiment is designed to make a map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy on angular scales from 070 to several degrees. Using the map, we determine the angular power spectrum of the anisotropy in multipole bands from l~40 to l~140. The results are consistent with the SK (from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada) measurements. The frequency spectral index (measured at low l) is consistent with that of CMB and inconsistent with either Galactic synchrotron or free-free emission. The instrument, measurement, analysis of the angular power spectrum, and possible systematic errors are discussed.
The Astrophysical Journal 01/2009; 509(2):L69. · 6.02 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: We present an upper limit on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at 7° angular scales in the frequency band between 26 and 36 GHz, produced by the Polarization Observations of Large Angular Regions experiment. The campaign produced a map of linear polarization over the right ascension range 112°-275° at declination 43°. The model-independent upper limit on the E-mode polarization component of the CMB at angular scales l = 2-20 is 10 μK (95% confidence). The corresponding limit for the B-mode is also 10 μK. Constraining the B-mode power to be zero, the 95% confidence limit on E-mode power alone is 8 μK.
The Astrophysical Journal 12/2008; 560(1):L1. · 6.02 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: We quantify the level of foreground contamination in the QMAP cosmic microwave background data with two objectives: (1) to measure the level to which the QMAP power spectrum measurements need to be corrected for foregrounds and (2) to use this data set to further refine current foreground models. We cross-correlate the QMAP data with a variety of foreground templates. The 30 GHz Ka-band data are found to be significantly correlated with the Haslam 408 MHz and Reich & Reich 1420 MHz synchrotron maps but not with the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment 240, 140, and 100 μm maps or the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper survey. The 40 GHz Q band has no significant template correlations. We discuss the constraints that this places on synchrotron, free-free, and dust emission. We also reanalyze the foreground-cleaned Ka-band data and find that the two band power measurements are lowered by 2.3% and 1.3%, respectively.
The Astrophysical Journal 12/2008; 542(1):L5. · 6.02 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Most analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background spherical harmonic coefficients a_lm has focused on estimating the power spectrum C_l=<|a_lm|^2> rather than the coefficients themselves. We present a minimum-variance method for measuring a_lm given anisotropic noise, incomplete sky coverage and foreground contamination, and apply it to the WMAP data. Our method is shown to constitute lossless data compression in the sense that the widely used quadratic estimators of the power spectrum C_l can be computed directly from our a_lm-estimators. As the Galactic cut is increased, the error bars Delta-a_lm on low multipoles go from being dominated by foregrounds to being dominated by sample variance from other multipoles, with the intervening minimum defining the optimal cut. Applying our method to the WMAP quadrupole and octopole, we find that their previously reported "axis of evil" alignment appears to be rather robust to Galactic cut and foreground contamination. Comment: 3-year WMAP results added, TOH foreground-cleaned 3-year map available at http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/wmap.html . 15 PRD pages, 7 figs. More multipoles available electronically from the authors on request
03/2006;
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ABSTRACT: Great efforts are currently being channeled into ground- and balloon-based CMB experiments, mainly to explore anisotropy on small angular scales and polarization. To optimize instrumental design and assess experimental prospects, it is important to understand in detail the atmosphere-related systematic errors that limit the science achievable with new suborbital instruments. For this purpose, we spatially compare the 648 square degree ground- and balloon-based QMASK map with the atmosphere-free WMAP map, finding beautiful agreement on all angular scales where both are sensitive. This is a reassuring quantitative assessment of the power of the state-of-the-art FFT- and matrix-based mapmaking techniques that have been used for QMASK and virtually all subsequent experiments. Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. More info at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~angelica/skymap.html QMASK data and covariance matrix at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~xuyz/qmask.html
06/2004;
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ABSTRACT: The WMAP team has produced a foreground map that can account for most of the low-frequency Galactic microwave emission in the WMAP maps, tentatively interpreting it as synchrotron emission. Finkbeiner and collaborators have challenged these conclusions, arguing that the WMAP team "synchrotron" template is in fact not dominated by synchrotron radiation, but by some dust-related Galactic emission process, perhaps spinning dust grains, making dramatically different predictions for its behavior at lower frequencies. By cross-correlating this "synchrotron" template with 10 and 15 GHz CMB observations, we find that its spectrum turns over in a manner consistent with spinning dust emission, falling about an order of magnitude below what the synchrotron interpretation would predict. Comment: 4 pages, 1 fig. Submitted to ApJ. Color figures and more foreground information at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~angelica/foreground.html or from angelica@hep.upenn.edu
The Astrophysical Journal 12/2003; · 6.02 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: We investigate anomalies reported in the Cosmic Microwave Background maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite on very large angular scales and discuss possible interpretations. Three independent anomalies involve the quadrupole and octopole: 1. The cosmic quadrupole on its own is anomalous at the 1-in-20 level by being low (the cut-sky quadrupole measured by the WMAP team is more strikingly low, apparently due to a coincidence in the orientation of our Galaxy of no cosmological significance); 2. The cosmic octopole on its own is anomalous at the 1-in-20 level by being very planar; 3. The alignment between the quadrupole and octopole is anomalous at the 1-in-60 level. Although the a priori chance of all three occurring is 1 in 24000, the multitude of alternative anomalies one could have looked for dilutes the significance of such a posteriori statistics. The simplest small universe model where the universe has toroidal topology with one small dimension of order half the horizon scale, in the direction towards Virgo, could explain the three items above. However, we rule this model out using two topological tests: the S-statistic and the matched circle test. Comment: N.B. that our results do not rule out the recently proposed dodecahedron model of Luminet, Weeks, Riazuelo, Lehoucq & Uzan, which has a 36 degree twist between matched circles. 12 pages, 5 figs; more info at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~angelica/topology.html
07/2003;
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ABSTRACT: We perform an independent foreground analysis of the WMAP maps to produce a cleaned CMB map (available online) useful for cross-correlation with, e.g., galaxy and X-ray maps. We use a variant of the Tegmark & Efstathiou (1996) technique that is completely blind, making no assumptions about the CMB power spectrum, the foregrounds, WMAP detector noise or external templates. Compared with the foreground-cleaned internal linear combination map produced by the WMAP team, our map has the advantage of containing less non-CMB power (from foregrounds and detector noise) outside the Galactic plane. The difference is most important on the the angular scale of the first acoustic peak and below, since our cleaned map is at the highest (13') rather than lowest (49') WMAP resolution. We also produce a Wiener filtered CMB map, representing our best guess as to what the CMB sky actually looks like, as well as CMB-free maps at the five WMAP frequencies useful for foreground studies. We argue that our CMB map is clean enough that the lowest multipoles can be measured without any galaxy cut, and obtain a quadrupole value that is slightly less low than that from the cut-sky WMAP team analysis. This can be understood from a map of the CMB quadrupole, which shows much of its power falling within the Galaxy cut region, seemingly coincidentally. Intriguingly, both the quadrupole and the octopole are seen to have power suppressed along a particular spatial axis, which lines up between the two, roughly towards (l,b) \~ (-110,60) in Virgo. Comment: Replaced to match accepted version. Added grids, refs, method details. The low-res images don't do justice to the WMAP data; high-res version of paper available at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/wmap.html with cleaned map fits files
02/2003;
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ABSTRACT: The coming flood of CMB polarization experiments, spurred by the recent detection of CMB polarization by DASI and WMAP, will be confronted by many new analysis tasks specific to polarization. For the analysis of CMB polarization data sets, the devil is truly in the details. With this in mind, we present the details of the data analysis for the POLAR experiment, which recently led to the tightest upper limits on the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation at large angular scales. We discuss the data selection process, mapmaking algorithms, offset removal, and the likelihood analysis which were used to find upper limits on the polarization. Stated using the modern convention for reporting CMB Stokes parameters, these limits are 5.0 \uK on both E-type and B-type polarization at 95% confidence. Finally, we discuss simulations used to test our analysis techniques and to probe the fundamental limitations of the experiment. Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Phys.Rev.D
12/2002;
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ABSTRACT: Separation of the E and B components of a microwave background polarization map or a weak lensing map is an essential step in extracting science from it, but when the map covers only part of the sky and/or is pixelized, this decomposition cannot be done perfectly. We present a method for decomposing an arbitrary sky map into a sum of three orthogonal components that we term ``pure E'', ``pure B'' and ``ambiguous''. This method is useful both for providing intuition for experimental design and for analyzing data sets in practice. We show how to find orthonormal bases for all three components in terms of bilaplacian eigenfunctions. The number of ambiguous modes is proportional to the length of the map boundary so fairly round maps are preferred. For real-world data analysis, we present a simple matrix eigenvalue method for calculating nearly pure E and B modes in pixelized maps. We find that the dominant source of leakage between E and B is aliasing of small-scale power caused by the pixelization. This problem can be eliminated by heavily oversampling the map, but is exacerbated by the fact that the E power spectrum is expected to be much larger than the B power spectrum and extremely blue. We found that a factor of 2 to 3 more pixels are needed in a polarization map to achieve the same level of contamination by aliased power than in a temperature map. Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures
07/2002;
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ABSTRACT: We compute upper limits on CMB cross-polarization by cross-correlating the PIQUE and Saskatoon experiments. We also discuss theoretical and practical issues relevant to measuring cross-polarization and illustrate them with simulations of the upcoming BOOMERanG 2002 experiment. We present a method that separates all six polarization power spectra (TT, EE, BB, TE, TB, EB) without any other "leakage" than the familiar EE-BB mixing caused by incomplete sky coverage. Since E and B get mixed, one might expect leakage between TE and TB, between EE and EB and between BB and EB - our method eliminates this by preserving the parity symmetry under which TB and EB are odd and the other four power spectra are even. Comment: Polarization movies can be found at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~angelica/polarization.html
04/2002;
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ABSTRACT: We measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum on angular scales l~30-200 (1-6 degrees) from the QMASK map, which combines the data from the QMAP and Saskatoon experiments. Since the accuracy of recent measurements leftward of the first acoustic peak is limited by sample-variance, the large area of the QMASK map (648 square degrees) allows us to place among the sharpest constraints to date in this range, in good agreement with BOOMERanG and (on the largest scales) COBE/DMR. By band-pass-filtering the QMAP and Saskatoon maps, we are able to spatially compare them scale-by-scale to check for beam- and pointing-related systematic errors. Comment: Revised to match accepted PRD version. Substantially expanded. Window functions, map and covariance matrix at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~xuyz/qmask.html
04/2001;
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ABSTRACT: We present a method for comparing and combining maps with different resolutions and beam shapes, and apply it to the Saskatoon, QMAP, and COBE-DMR data sets. Although the Saskatoon and QMAP maps detect signals at the 21σ and 40σ levels, respectively, their difference is consistent with pure noise, placing strong limits on possible systematic errors. In particular, we obtain quantitative upper limits on relative calibration and pointing errors. Splitting the combined data by frequency shows similar consistency between the Ka and Q bands, placing limits on foreground contamination. The visual agreement between the maps is equally striking. Our combined QMAP+Saskatoon map, nicknamed QMASK, is publicly available on the web together with its 6495×6495 noise covariance matrix. This thoroughly tested data set covers a large enough area (648 square degrees—currently the largest degree-scale map available) to allow a statistical comparison with COBE-DMR, showing good agreement.
Phys. Rev. D. 04/2001; 63(10).
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ABSTRACT: We present a method for measuring CMB polarization power spectra given incomplete sky coverage and test it with simulated examples such as Boomerang 2001 and MAP. By augmenting the quadratic estimator method with an additional step, we find that the E and B power spectra can be effectively disentangled on angular scales substantially smaller than the width of the sky patch in the narrowest direction. We find that the basic quadratic and maximum-likelihood methods display a unneccesary sensitivity to systematic errors when T-E cross-correlation is involved, and show how this problem can be eliminated at negligible cost in increased error bars. We also test numerically the widely used approximation that sample variance scales inversely with sky coverage, and find it to be an excellent approximation on scales substantially smaller than the sky patch. Comment: Revised to match published PRD version. Expanded with easy-to-code-up equations for TB and EB cross-correlation cases as well. 17 PRD pages, 13 figs. Links etc at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/polarization.html or from max@physics.upenn.edu
12/2000;
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Angelica de Oliveira-Costa,
Max Tegmark,
Douglas P. Finkbeiner,
R. D. Davies,
Carlos M. Gutierrez,
L. M. Haffner,
Aled W. Jones,
A. N. Lasenby,
R. Rebolo,
Ron J. Reynolds,
S. L. Tufte,
R A Watson
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ABSTRACT: We present a new puzzle involving Galactic microwave emission and attempt to resolve it. On one hand, a cross-correlation analysis of the WHAM H-alpha map with the Tenerife 10 and 15 GHz maps shows that the well-known DIRBE correlated microwave emission cannot be dominated by free-free emission. On the other hand, recent high resolution observations in the 8-10 GHz range with the Green Bank 140 ft telescope by Finkbeiner et al. failed to find the corresponding 8 sigma signal that would be expected in the simplest spinning dust models. So what physical mechanism is causing this ubiquitous dust-correlated emission? We argue for a model predicting that spinning dust is the culprit after all, but that the corresponding small grains are well correlated with the larger grains seen at 100 micron only on large angular scales. In support of this grain segregation model, we find the best spinning dust template to involve higher frequency maps in the range 12-60 micron, where emission from transiently heated small grains is important. Upcoming CMB experiments such as ground-based interferometers, MAP and Planck LFI with high resolution at low frequencies should allow a definitive test of this model. Comment: Minor revisions to match accepted ApJ version. 6 pages, 4 figs. Color figures and more foreground information at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~angelica/foreground.html#spin or from angelica@hep.upenn.edu
The Astrophysical Journal 10/2000; · 6.02 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: One of the main challenges facing upcoming CMB experiments will be to distinguish the cosmological signal from foreground contamination. We present a comprehensive treatment of this problem and study how foregrounds degrade the accuracy with which the Boomerang, MAP and Planck experiments can measure cosmological parameters. Our foreground model includes not only the normalization, frequency dependence and scale dependence for each physical component, but also variations in frequency dependence across the sky. When estimating how accurately cosmological parameter can be measured, we include the important complication that foreground model parameters (we use about 500) must be simultaneously measured from the data as well. Our results are quite encouraging: despite all these complications, precision measurements of most cosmological parameters are degraded by less than a factor of 2 for our main foreground model and by less than a factor of 5 in our most pessimistic scenario. Parameters measured though large-angle polarization signals suffer more degradation: up to 5 in the main model and 25 in the pessimistic case. The foregrounds that are potentially most damaging and therefore most in need of further study are vibrating dust emission and point sources, especially those in the radio frequencies. It is well-known that E and B polarization contain valuable information about reionization and gravity waves, respectively. However, the cross-correlation between polarized and unpolarized foregrounds also deserves further study, as we find that it carries the bulk of the polarization information about most other cosmological parameters. Comment: Expanded to match accepted ApJ version, including a new figure and more explanatory text. 30 ApJ pages, including 141 figure panels - sorry... Foreground models and software at http://www.sns.ias.edu/~max/foregrounds.html or from max@ias.edu
05/1999;
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ABSTRACT: The recent discovery of dust-correlated diffuse microwave emission has prompted two rival explanations: free-free emission and spinning dust grains. We present new detections of this component at 10 and 15 GHz by the switched-beam Tenerife experiment. The data show a turnover in the spectrum and thereby supports the spinning dust hypothesis. We also present a significant detection of synchrotron radiation at 10 GHz, useful for normalizing foreground contamination of CMB experiments at high-galactic latitudes. Comment: 5 pages, with 3 figures included. Color figures and links at http://www.sns.ias.edu/~angelica/foreground.html#tenerife"
The Astrophysical Journal 04/1999; · 6.02 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: We report the results from the second flight of QMAP, an experiment to map the cosmic microwave background near the North Celestial Pole. We present maps of the sky at 31 and 42 GHz as well as a measurement of the angular power spectrum covering the l-range 40-200. Anisotropy is detected at about 20 sigma and is in agreement with previous results at these angular scales. We also report details of the data reduction and analysis techniques which were used for both flights of QMAP. Comment: 4 pages, with 5 figures included. Submitted to ApJL. Window functions and color figures are available at http://pupgg.princeton.edu/~cmb/welcome.html
08/1998;
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ABSTRACT: We report on the first flight of the balloon-borne QMAP experiment. The experiment is designed to make a map of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy on angular scales from 0.7 to several degrees. Using the map we determine the angular power spectrum of the anisotropy in multipole bands from l~40 to l~140. The results are consistent with the Saskatoon (SK) measurements. The frequency spectral index (measured at low l) is consistent with that of CMB and inconsistent with either Galactic synchrotron or free-free emission. The instrument, measurement, analysis of the angular power spectrum, and possible systematic errors are discussed. Comment: 4 pages, with 5 figures included. Submitted to ApJL. Window functions and color figures are available at http://pupgg.princeton.edu/~cmb/welcome.html
08/1998;
