Related papers: Igloo Pixelizations
We investigate various pixelizations of the sky which allow for fast spherical transforms, for implementation in full sky CMB experiments such as Planck and MAP. We study the effect of varying pixel shape and area on the extraction of the…
A great deal of experimental effort is currently being devoted to the precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky in temperature and polarisation. Satellites, balloon-borne, and ground-based experiments scrutinize the…
We point out that polarization measurements as planned for the upcoming PLANCK mission can significantly enhance the accuracy of cosmic parameter estimation compared to the temperature anisotropy spectrum alone. In order to illustrate this,…
Despite the fact that the physics of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies is most naturally expressed in Fourier space, pixelised maps are almost always used in the analysis and simulation of microwave data. A complementary approach…
Cosmic microwave background experiments have experienced an exponential increase in complexity, data size and sensitivity. One of the goals of current and future experiments is to characterize the B-mode power spectrum, which would be…
Large patterns could exist on the microwave sky as a result of various non-standard possibilities for the large-scale Universe -- rotation or shear, non-trivial topology, and single topological defects are specific examples. All-sky (or…
The upcoming satellite missions MAP and Planck will measure the spectrum of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background with unprecedented accuracy. We discuss the prospect of using these observations to distinguish among proposed…
We present a new model of the microwave sky in polarization that can be used to simulate data from CMB polarization experiments. We exploit the most recent results from the Planck satellite to provide an accurate description of the diffuse…
Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by interferometers offer several advantages over single-dish observations. The formalism for analyzing interferometer CMB data is well developed in the flat-sky approximation,…
This work describes Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data analysis algorithms and their implementations, developed to produce a pixelized map of the sky and a corresponding pixel-pixel noise correlation matrix from time ordered data for a…
With polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now detected, and confirmed by several independent experiments, the next goal is to characterise accurately its statistical properties. In these lecture notes we review the physical…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy is our richest source of cosmological information; the standard cosmological model was largely established thanks to study of the temperature anisotropies. By the end of the decade, the Planck…
Earlier papers introduced a method of accurately estimating the angular cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature power spectrum based on Gibbs sampling. Here we extend this framework to polarized data. All advantages of the Gibbs…
We study the ellipticity of contour lines in the sky maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as well as other measures of elongation. The sensitivity of the elongation on the resolution of the CMB maps which depends on the…
We present a new approach to component separation in multifrequency CMB experiments by formulating the problem as that of partitioning the sky into pixel clusters such that within each pixel cluster the foregrounds have similar spectrum,…
In this paper, we focus our attention on the following question: How well can we recover the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from the maps of a given experiment?. Each experiment is described by a a pixelization scale, a…
For power spectrum estimation it's important that the pixelization of a CMB sky map be smooth and regular to high degree. With this criterion in mind the ``COBE sky cube" was defined. This paper has as central theme to further improve on…
We evaluate the expected level of foreground contamination to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarised radiation, focusing on the diffuse emission from our own Galaxy. In particular, we perform a first attempt to simulate an all sky…
We introduce a pixel space method to detect dipole modulation or hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization. The method relies on the use of squared total polarized flux whose ensemble average picks…
Multiply connected space sections of the universe on a scale smaller than the horizon size can leave an imprint on cosmic microwave background polarization maps, in such a way that the so-called ``circles-in-the-sky'' method can be used to…