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Author: search.filters.author.Saha, RajibSubject: search.filters.subject.Observations

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    Re-analysis of the three-year wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe temperature power spectrum and likelihood
    (2006-10-02) Eriksen, H. K.; Huey, Greg; Saha, Rajib; et al.
    We analyze the three-year WMAP temperature anisotropy data seeking to confirm the power spectrum and likelihoods published by the WMAP team. We apply five independent implementations of four algorithms to the power spectrum estimation and two implementations to the parameter estimation. Our single most important result is that we broadly confirm the WMAP power spectrum and analysis. Still, we do find two small but potentially important discrepancies: On large angular scales there is a small power excess in the WMAP spectrum (5–10% at ℓ . 30) primarily due to likelihood approximation issues between 13 ≤ ℓ . 30. On small angular scales there is a systematic difference between the V- and W-band spectra (few percent at ℓ & 300). Recently, the latter discrepancy was explained by Huffenberger et al. (2006) in terms of over-subtraction of unresolved point sources. As far as the low-ℓ bias is concerned, most parameters are affected by a few tenths of a sigma. The most important effect is seen in ns. For the combination of WMAP, Acbar and BOOMERanG, the significance of ns = 1 drops from ∼ 2.7σ to ∼ 2.3σ when correcting for this bias. We propose a few simple improvements to the low-ℓ WMAP likelihood code, and introduce two important extensions to the Gibbs sampling method that allows for proper sampling of the low signal-to-noise regime. Finally, we make the products from the Gibbs sampling analysis publically available, thereby providing a fast and simple route to the exact likelihood without the need of expensive matrix inversions.
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    Blind estimation of the power spectrum of CMB anisotropy from WMAP
    (2005-06-01) Saha, Rajib; Jain, Pankaj; Souradeep, Tarun
    Accurate measurements of angular power spectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation has lead to marked improvement in the estimates of different cosmological parameters. This has required removal of foreground contamination as well as detector noise bias with reliability and precision. We present the estimation of CMB angular power spectrum from the multi-frequency observations ofWMAP using a novel model-independent method. The primary product of WMAP are the observations of CMB in 10 independent difference assemblies (DA) that have uncorrelated noise. Our method utilizes maximum information available within WMAP data by linearly combining all the DA maps to remove foregrounds and estimating the power spectrum from cross power spectra of clean maps with independent noise. We compute 24 cross power spectra which are the basis of the final power spectrum. The binned average power matches with WMAP team’s published power spectrum closely. A small systematic difference at large multipoles is accounted for by the correction for the expected residual power from unresolved point sources. The correction is small and significantly tempered. Previous estimates have depended on foreground templates built using extraneous observational input. This is the first demonstration that the CMB angular spectrum can be reliably estimated with precision from a self contained analysis of the WMAP data.