arXiv subjects

H. T. Ihle

Publications and source records attributed to H. T. Ihle.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

BeyondPlanck XII. Cosmological parameter constraints with end-to-end error propagation

We present cosmological parameter constraints as estimated using the Bayesian BeyondPlanck (BP) analysis framework. This method supports seamless end-to-end error propagation from raw time-ordered data to final cosmological parameters. As a first demonstration of the method, we analyze time-ordered Planck LFI observations, combined with selected external data (WMAP 33-61GHz, Planck HFI DR4 353 and 857GHz, and Haslam 408MHz) in the form of pixelized maps which are used to break critical astrophysical degeneracies. Overall, all results are generally in good agreement with previously reported values from Planck 2018 and WMAP, with the largest relative difference for any parameter of about 1 sigma when considering only temperature multipoles between 29<l<601. In cases where there are differences, we note that the BP results are generally slightly closer to the high-l HFI-dominated Planck 2018 results than previous analyses, suggesting slightly less tension between low and high multipoles. Using low-l polarization information from LFI and WMAP, we find a best-fit value of tau=0.066 +/- 0.013, which is higher than the low value of tau=0.051 +/- 0.006 derived from Planck 2018 and slightly lower than the value of 0.069 +/- 0.011 derived from joint analysis of official LFI and WMAP products. Most importantly, however, we find that the uncertainty derived in the BP processing is about 30% larger than when analyzing the official products, after taking into account the different sky coverage. We argue that this is due to marginalizing over a more complete model of instrumental and astrophysical parameters, and this results in both more reliable and more rigorously defined uncertainties. We find that about 2000 Monte Carlo samples are required to achieve robust convergence for low-resolution CMB covariance matrix with 225 independent modes.

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arXiv2022

BeyondPlanck VII. Bayesian estimation of gain and absolute calibration for CMB experiments

We present a Bayesian calibration algorithm for CMB observations as implemented within the global end-to-end BeyondPlanck (BP) framework, and apply this to the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) data. Following the most recent Planck analysis, we decompose the full time-dependent gain into a sum of three orthogonal components: One absolute calibration term, common to all detectors; one time-independent term that can vary between detectors; and one time-dependent component that is allowed to vary between one-hour pointing periods. Each term is then sampled conditionally on all other parameters in the global signal model through Gibbs sampling. The absolute calibration is sampled using only the orbital dipole as a reference source, while the two relative gain components are sampled using the full sky signal, including the orbital and Solar CMB dipoles, CMB fluctuations, and foreground contributions. We discuss various aspects of the data that influence gain estimation, including the dipole/polarization quadrupole degeneracy and anomalous jumps in the instrumental gain. Comparing our solution to previous pipelines, we find good agreement in general, with relative deviations of -0.67% (-0.84%) for 30 GHz, 0.12% (-0.04%) for 44 GHz and -0.03% (-0.64%) for 70 GHz, compared to Planck DR4 (Planck 2018). The deviations we find are within expected error bounds, and we attribute them to differences in data usage and general approach between the pipelines. In particular, the BP calibration is performed globally, resulting in better inter-frequency consistency. Additionally, WMAP observations are used actively in the BP analysis, which breaks degeneracies in the Planck data set and results in better agreement with WMAP. Although our presentation and algorithm are currently oriented toward LFI processing, the procedure is fully generalizable to other experiments.

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arXiv2022

BeyondPlanck XVI. Limits on Large-Scale Polarized Anomalous Microwave Emission from Planck LFI and WMAP

We constrain the level of polarized anomalous microwave emission (AME) on large angular scales using $\textit{Planck}$ LFI and $\textit{WMAP}$ polarization data within a Bayesian CMB analysis framework. We model synchrotron emission with a power-law spectral energy distribution, and the sum of AME and thermal dust emission through linear regression with the $\textit{Planck}$ HFI 353 GHz data. This template-based dust emission model allows us to constrain the level of polarized AME while making minimal assumptions on its frequency dependence. We neglect cosmic microwave background fluctuations, but show through simulations that these have a minor impact on the results. We find that the resulting AME polarization fraction confidence limit is sensitive to the polarized synchrotron spectral index prior, and for priors steeper than $β_{\mathrm{s}} = -3.1\pm0.1$ we find an upper limit of $p_{\mathrm{AME}}^{\rm max}\lesssim 0.6\,\%$ ($95\,\%$ confidence). In contrast, for $β_{\mathrm{s}}=-3.0\pm0.1$, we find a nominal detection of $p_{\mathrm{AME}}=2.5\pm1.0\,\%$ ($95\,\%$ confidence). These data are thus not strong enough to simultaneously and robustly constrain both polarized synchrotron emission and AME, and our main result is therefore a constraint on the AME polarization fraction explicitly as a function of $β_\mathrm{s}$. Combining the current $\textit{Planck}$ and $\textit{WMAP}$ observations with measurements from high-sensitivity low-frequency experiments such as C-BASS and QUIJOTE will be critical to improve these limits further.

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arXiv2022

BeyondPlanck V. Minimal ADC Corrections for Planck LFI

We describe the correction procedure for Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) differential non-linearities (DNL) adopted in the Bayesian end-to-end BeyondPlanck analysis framework. This method is nearly identical to that developed for the official LFI Data Processing Center (DPC) analysis, and relies on the binned rms noise profile of each detector data stream. However, rather than building the correction profile directly from the raw rms profile, we first fit a Gaussian to each significant ADC-induced rms decrement, and then derive the corresponding correction model from this smooth model. The main advange of this approach is that only samples which are significantly affected by ADC DNLs are corrected. The new corrections are only applied to data for which there is a clear detection of the non-linearities, and for which they perform at least comparably with the DPC corrections. Out of a total of 88 LFI data streams (sky and reference load for each of the 44 detectors) we apply the new minimal ADC corrections in 25 cases, and maintain the DPC corrections in 8 cases. All these correctsion are applited to 44 or 70 GHz channels, while, as in previous analyses, none of the 30 GHz ADCs show significant evidence of non-linearity. By comparing the BeyondPlanck and DPC ADC correction methods, we estimate that the residual ADC uncertainty is about two orders of magnitude below the total noise of both the 44 and 70 GHz channels, and their impact on current cosmological parameter estimation is small. However, we also show that non-idealities in the ADC corrections can generate sharp stripes in the final frequency maps, and these could be important for future joint analyses with HFI, WMAP, or other datasets. We therefore conclude that, although the existing corrections are adequate for LFI-based cosmological parameter analysis, further work on LFI ADC corrections is still warranted.

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arXiv2022

BeyondPlanck XV. Polarized foreground emission between 30 and 70 GHz

We constrain polarized foreground emission between 30 and 70 GHz with the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) and WMAP data within the global Bayesian BeyondPlanck framework. We combine for the first time full-resolution Planck LFI time-ordered data with low-resolution WMAP sky maps at 33, 40 and 61 GHz. Spectral parameters are fit with a likelihood defined at the native resolution of each frequency channel. This analysis represents the first implementation of true multi-resolution component separation applied to CMB observations for both amplitude and spectral energy distribution (SED) parameters. For synchrotron emission, we approximate the SED as a power-law in frequency and find that the low signal-to-noise ratio of the current data strongly limits the number of free parameters that may be robustly constrained. We partition the sky into four large disjoint regions (High Latitude; Galactic Spur; Galactic Plane; and Galactic Center), each associated with its own power-law index. We find that the High Latitude region is prior-dominated, while the Galactic Center region is contaminated by residual instrumental systematics. The two remaining regions appear to be signal-dominated, and for these we derive spectral indices of $β_{\mathrm s}^{\mathrm{Spur}}=-3.17\pm0.06$ and $β_{\mathrm s}^{\mathrm{Plane}}=-3.03\pm0.07$, in good agreement with previous results. For thermal dust emission we assume a modified blackbody model and we fit a single power-law index across the full sky. We find $β_{\mathrm{d}}=1.64\pm0.03$, which is slightly steeper than reported from Planck HFI data, but still statistically consistent at the 2$σ$ confidence level.

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arXiv2022

BeyondPlanck X. Bandpass and beam leakage corrections

We discuss the treatment of bandpass and beam leakage corrections in the Bayesian BeyondPlanck CMB analysis pipeline as applied to the Planck LFI measurements. As a preparatory step, we first apply three corrections to the nominal LFI bandpass profiles including removal of a known systematic effect in the ground measuring equipment at 61 GHz; smoothing of standing wave ripples; and edge regularization. The main net impact of these modifications is an overall shift in the 70 GHz bandpass of +0.6 GHz; we argue that any analysis of LFI data products, either from Planck or BeyondPlanck, should use these new bandpasses. In addition, we fit a single free bandpass parameter for each radiometer of the form $Δ_i = Δ_0 + δ_i$, where $Δ_0$ represents an absolute frequency shift per frequency band and $δ_i$ is a relative shift per detector. The absolute correction is only fitted at 30 GHz with a full $χ^2$-based likelihood, resulting in a correction of $Δ_{30}=0.24\pm0.03\,$GHz. The relative corrections are fitted using a spurious map approach, fundamentally similar to the method pioneered by the WMAP team, but without introducing many additional degrees of freedom. All bandpass parameters are sampled using a standard Metropolis sampler within the main BeyondPlanck Gibbs chain, and bandpass uncertainties are thus propagated to all other data products in the analysis. In total, we find that our bandpass model significantly reduces leakage effects. For beam leakage corrections, we adopt the official Planck LFI beam estimates without additional degrees of freedom, and only marginalize over the underlying sky model. We note that this is the first time leakage from beam mismatch has been included for Planck LFI maps.

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arXiv2022

BeyondPlanck III. Commander3

We describe the computational infrastructure for end-to-end Bayesian CMB analysis implemented by the BeyondPlanck collaboration. This code is called commander3, and provides a statistically consistent framework for global analysis of CMB and microwave observations, and may be useful for a wide range of legacy, current, and future experiments. The paper has three main goals. Firstly, we provide a high-level overview of the existing code base, aiming to guide readers who wish to extend and adapt the code according to their own needs, or to reimplement it from scratch in a different programming language. Secondly, we discuss some critical computational challenges that arise within any global CMB analysis framework, for instance in-memory compression of time-ordered data, FFT optimization, and parallelization and load-balancing. Thirdly, we quantify the CPU and RAM requirements for the current BeyondPlanck analysis, and find that a total of 1.5 TB of RAM is required for efficient analysis, and the total cost of a full Gibbs sample is 170 CPU-hrs, including both low-level processing and high-level component separation, which is well within the capabilities of current low-cost computing facilities. The existing code base is made publicly available under a GNU General Public Library (GPL) license.

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arXiv2022

BeyondPlanck VIII. Efficient Sidelobe Convolution and Correction through Spin Harmonics

We introduce a new formulation of the Conviqt convolution algorithm in terms of spin harmonics, and apply this to the problem of sidelobe correction for BeyondPlanck, the first end-to-end Bayesian Gibbs sampling framework for CMB analysis. We compare our implementation to the previous Planck LevelS implementation, and find good agreement between the two codes in terms of accuracy, but with a speed-up reaching a factor of 3--10, depending on the frequency bandlimits, $l_{\textrm{max}}$ and $m_{\textrm{max}}$. The new algorithm is significantly simpler to implement and maintain, since all low-level calculations are handled through an external spherical harmonic transform library. We find that our mean sidelobe estimates for Planck LFI agree well with previous efforts. Additionally, we present novel sidelobe rms maps that quantify the uncertainty in the sidelobe corrections due to variations in the sky model.

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arXiv2020

BeyondPlanck II. CMB map-making through Gibbs sampling

We present a Gibbs sampling solution to the map-making problem for CMB measurements, building on existing destriping methodology. Gibbs sampling breaks the computationally heavy destriping problem into two separate steps; noise filtering and map binning. Considered as two separate steps, both are computationally much cheaper than solving the combined problem. This provides a huge performance benefit as compared to traditional methods, and allows us for the first time to bring the destriping baseline length to a single sample. We apply the Gibbs procedure to simulated Planck 30 GHz data. We find that gaps in the time-ordered data are handled efficiently by filling them with simulated noise as part of the Gibbs process. The Gibbs procedure yields a chain of map samples, from which we may compute the posterior mean as a best-estimate map. The variation in the chain provides information on the correlated residual noise, without need to construct a full noise covariance matrix. However, if only a single maximum-likelihood frequency map estimate is required, we find that traditional conjugate gradient solvers converge much faster than a Gibbs sampler in terms of total number of iterations. The conceptual advantages of the Gibbs sampling approach lies in statistically well-defined error propagation and systematic error correction, and this methodology forms the conceptual basis for the map-making algorithm employed in the BeyondPlanck framework, which implements the first end-to-end Bayesian analysis pipeline for CMB observations.

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arXiv2014

Testing for foreground residuals in the Planck foreground cleaned maps: A new method for designing confidence masks

We test for foreground residuals in the foreground cleaned Planck Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps outside and inside U73 mask commonly used for cosmological analysis. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new method to validate masks by looking at the differences in cleaned maps obtained by different component separation methods. By analyzing the power spectrum as well as the mean, variance and skewness of needlet coefficients on bands outside and inside the U73 mask we first confirm that the pixels already masked by U73 are highly contaminated and cannot be used for cosmological analysis. We further find that the U73 mask needs extension in order to reduce large scale foreground residuals to a level of less than $20\%$ of the standard deviation of CMB fluctuations within the bands closest to the galactic equator. We also find 276 point sources in the cleaned foreground maps which are currently not masked by the U73 mask. Our final publicly available extended mask leaves $65.9\%$ of the sky for cosmological analysis. Note that this extended mask may be important for analyses on local sky patches; in full sky analyses the additional residuals near the galactic equator may average out.

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