Power spectrum sensitivity of raster-scanned CMB experiments in the presence of 1/f noise

Abstract

We investigate the effects of 1/f noise on the ability of a particular class of Cosmic Microwave Background experiments to measure the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropy. We concentrate on experiments that operate primarily in raster-scan mode and develop formalism that allows us to calculate analytically the effect of 1/f noise on power spectrum sensitivity for this class of experiments and determine the benefits of raster-scanning at different angles relative to the sky field versus scanning at only a single angle (cross-linking versus not cross-linking). We find that the sensitivity of such experiments in the presence of 1/f noise is not significantly degraded at moderate spatial scales (l ~ 100) for reasonable values of scan speed and 1/f knee. We further find that the difference between cross-linked and non-cross-linked experiments is small in all cases and that the non-cross-linked experiments are preferred from a raw sensitivity standpoint in the noise-dominated regime -- i.e., in experiments in which the instrument noise is greater than the sample variance of the target power spectrum at the scales of interest. This analysis does not take into account systematic effects.