CMB anisotropy power spectrum using linear combinations of WMAP maps

Abstract

In recent years the goal of estimating different cosmological parameters precisely has set new challenges in the effort to accurately measure the angular power spectrum of CMB. This has required removal of foreground contamination as well as detector noise bias with reliability and precision. Recently, a novel model-independent method for the estimation of CMB angular power spectrum solely from multi-frequency observations has been proposed and implemented on the first yearWMAP data by Saha et al. 2006. All previous estimates of power spectrum of CMB are based upon foreground templates using data sets from different experiments. However our methodology demonstrates that CMB angular spectrum can be reliably estimated with precision from a self contained analysis of the WMAP data. In this work we provide a detailed description of this method. We also study and identify the biases present in our power spectrum estimate. We apply our methodoly to extract the power spectrum from the WMAP 1 year and 3 year data.