The PICASSO map-making code: application to a simulation of the QUIJOTE northern sky survey

Guidi, F.; Rubiño-Martín, J. A.; Pelaez-Santos, A. E.; Génova-Santos, R. T.; Ashdown, M.; Barreiro, R. B.; Bilbao-Ahedo, J. D.; Harper, S. E.; Watson, R. A.
Bibliographical reference

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Advertised on:
11
2021
Number of authors
9
IAC number of authors
4
Citations
7
Refereed citations
7
Description
Map-making is an important step for the data analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. It consists of converting the data, which are typically a long, complex, and noisy collection of measurements, into a map, which is an image of the observed sky. We present in this paper a new map-making code named PICASSO (Polarization and Intensity CArtographer for Scanned Sky Observations), which was implemented to construct intensity and polarization maps from the Multi Frequency Instrument (MFI) of the QUIJOTE (Q-U-I Joint TEnerife) CMB polarization experiment. PICASSO is based on the destriping algorithm, and is suited to address specific issues of ground-based microwave observations, with a technique that allows the fit of a template function in the time domain, during the map-making step. This paper describes the PICASSO code, validating it with simulations and assessing its performance. For this purpose, we produced realistic simulations of the QUIJOTE-MFI survey of the northern sky (approximately ~20 000 deg2), and analysed the reconstructed maps with PICASSO, using real and harmonic space statistics. We show that, for this sky area, PICASSO is able to reconstruct, with high fidelity, the injected signal, recovering all the scales with ℓ > 10 in TT, EE, and BB. The signal error is better than 0.001 per cent at 20 < ℓ < 200. Finally, we validated some of the methods that will be applied to the real wide-survey data, like the detection of the CMB anisotropies via cross-correlation analyses. Despite that the implementation of PICASSO is specific for QUIJOTE-MFI data, it could be adapted to other experiments.
Related projects
Full-sky map showing the spatial distribution of the primary anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (generated 380,000 years after the Big Bang) derived from observations of the Planck satellite
Anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background
The general goal of this project is to determine and characterize the spatial and spectral variations in the temperature and polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background in angular scales from several arcminutes to several degrees. The primordial matter density fluctuations which originated the structure in the matter distribution of the present
Rafael
Rebolo López
The QUIJOTE experiment at the Teide Observatory
QUIJOTE CMB Experiment (Q-U-I JOint TEnerife CMB Experiment)
QUIJOTE es un programa de dos telescopios y su batería de instrumentos, instalados en el Observatorio del Teide, dedicados fundamentalmente a la caracterización de la polarización del Fondo Cósmico de Microondas, en el rango de frecuencias de 10-42 GHz.
José Alberto
Rubiño Martín