F. Sureau

Sparse component separation for accurate cosmic microwave background estimation

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is of premier importance for cosmologists in studying the birth of our universe. Unfortunately, most CMB experiments, such as COBE, WMAP, or Planck do not directly measure the cosmological signal, because the CMB is mixed up with galactic foregrounds and point sources. For the sake of scientific exploitation, measuring the CMB requires extracting several different astrophysical components (CMB, Sunyaev-Zel’dovich clusters, galactic dust) from multiwavelength observations. Mathematically speaking, the problem of disentangling the CMB map from the galactic foregrounds amounts to a component or source separation problem. In the field of CMB studies, a wide range of source separation methods have been applied that all differ in the way they model the data and in the criteria they rely on to separate components. Two main difficulties are i) that the instrument’s beam varies across frequencies and ii) that the emission laws of most astrophysical components vary across pixels. This paper aims at introducing a very accurate modeling of CMB data, based on sparsity to account for beams’ variability across frequencies, as well as for spatial variations of the components’ spectral characteristics. Based on this new sparse modeling of the data, a sparsity-based component separation method coined local-generalized morphological component analysis (L-GMCA) is described. Extensive numerical experiments have been carried out with simulated Planck data. These experiments show the high efficiency of the proposed component separation methods for estimating a clean CMB map with a very low foreground contamination, which makes L-GMCA of prime interest for CMB studies.

WMAP nine-year CMB estimation using sparsity

Recovering the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from WMAP data requires galactic foreground emissions to be accurately separated out. Most component separation techniques rely on second order statistics such as Internal Linear Combination (ILC) techniques. In this paper, we present a new WMAP 9-year CMB map, with 15 arcmin resolution, which is reconstructed using a recently introduced sparse component separation technique, coined Local Generalized Morphological Component Analysis (LGMCA). LGMCA emphasizes on the sparsity of the components to be retrieved in the wavelet domain. We show that although derived from a radically different separation criterion ({i.e. sparsity), the LGMCA-WMAP 9 map and its power spectrum are fully consistent with their more recent estimates from WMAP 9.

Cosmic microwave background reconstruction from WMAP and Planck PR2 data

In this article, we describe a new estimate of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) intensity map reconstructed by a joint analysis of the full Planck 2015 data (PR2) and WMAP nine-years. It provides more than a mere update of the CMB map introduced in (Bobin et al. 2014b) since it benefits from an improvement of the component separation method L-GMCA (Local-Generalized Morphological Component Analysis) that allows the efficient separation of correlated components (Bobin et al. 2015). Based on the most recent CMB data, we further confirm previous results (Bobin et al. 2014b) showing that the proposed CMB map estimate exhibits appealing characteristics for astrophysical and cosmological applications: i) it is a full sky map that did not require any inpainting or interpolation post-processing, ii) foreground contamination is showed to be very low even on the galactic center, iii) it does not exhibit any detectable trace of thermal SZ contamination. We show that its power spectrum is in good agreement with the Planck PR2 official theoretical best-fit power spectrum. Finally, following the principle of reproducible research, we provide the codes to reproduce the L-GMCA, which makes it the only reproducible CMB map.We describe a new estimate of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) intensity map reconstructed by a joint analysis of the full Planck 2015 data (PR2) and nine years of WMAP data. The proposed map provides more than a mere update of the CMB map introduced in a previous paper since it benefits from an improvement of the component separation method L-GMCA (Local-Generalized Morphological Component Analysis), which facilitates efficient separation of correlated components. Based on the most recent CMB data, we further confirm previous results showing that the proposed CMB map estimate exhibits appealing characteristics for astrophysical and cosmological applications: i) it is a full-sky map as it did not require any inpainting or interpolation postprocessing; ii) foreground contamination is very low even on the galactic center; and iii) the map does not exhibit any detectable trace of thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich contamination. We show that its power spectrum is in good agreement with the Planck PR2 official theoretical best-fit power spectrum. Finally, following the principle of reproducible research, we provide the codes to reproduce the L-GMCA, which makes it the only reproducible CMB map.

PRISM: Sparse recovery of the primordial power spectrum

Aims. The primordial power spectrum describes the initial perturbations in the Universe which eventually grew into the large-scale structure we observe today, and thereby provides an indirect probe of inflation or other structure-formation mechanisms. Here, we introduce a new method to estimate this spectrum from the empirical power spectrum of cosmic microwave background maps. Methods. A sparsity-based linear inversion method, named PRISM, is presented. This technique leverages a sparsity prior on features in the primordial power spectrum in a wavelet basis to regularise the inverse problem. This non-parametric approach does not assume a strong prior on the shape of the primordial power spectrum, yet is able to correctly reconstruct its global shape as well as localised features. These advantages make this method robust for detecting deviations from the currently favoured scale-invariant spectrum. Results. We investigate the strength of this method on a set of WMAP nine-year simulated data for three types of primordial power spectra: a near scale-invariant spectrum, a spectrum with a small running of the spectral index, and a spectrum with a localised feature. This technique proves that it can easily detect deviations from a pure scale-invariant power spectrum and is suitable for distinguishing between simple models of the inflation. We process the WMAP nine-year data and find no significant departure from a near scaleinvariant power spectrum with the spectral index ns = 0:972. Conclusions. A high-resolution primordial power spectrum can be reconstructed with this technique, where any strong local deviations or small global deviations from a pure scale-invariant spectrum can easily be detected.

PRISM: Recovery of the primordial spectrum from Planck data

Aim. The primordial power spectrum describes the initial perturbations that seeded the large-scale structure we observe today. It provides an indirect probe of inflation or other structure-formation mechanisms. In this Letter, we recover the primordial power spectrum from the Planck PR1 dataset, using our recently published algorithm PRISM. Methods. PRISM is a sparsity-based inversion method that aims at recovering features in the primordial power spectrum from the empirical power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This ill-posed inverse problem is regularised using a sparsity prior on features in the primordial power spectrum in a wavelet dictionary. Although this non-parametric method does not assume a strong prior on the shape of the primordial power spectrum, it is able to recover both its general shape and localised features. As a results, this approach presents a reliable way of detecting deviations from the currently favoured scale-invariant spectrum. Results. We applied PRISM to 100 simulated Planck data to investigate its performance on Planck-like data. We then applied PRISM to the Planck PR1 power spectrum to recover the primordial power spectrum. We also tested the algorithms ability to recover a small localised feature at k similar to 0.125 Mpc(-1), which caused a large dip at l similar to 1800 in the angular power spectrum. Conclusions. We find no significant departures from the fiducial Planck PR1 near scale-invariant primordial power spectrum with A(s) = 2.215 x 10(-9) and n(s) = 0.9624.

Sparse point-source removal for full-sky CMB experiments: application to WMAP 9-year data

Missions such as WMAP or Planck measure full-sky fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background and foregrounds, among which bright compact source emissions cover a significant fraction of the sky. To accurately estimate the diffuse components, the point-source emissions need to be separated from the data, which requires a dedicated processing. We propose a new technique to estimate the flux of the brightest point sources using a morphological separation approach: point sources with known support and shape are separated from diffuse emissions that are assumed to be sparse in the spherical harmonic domain. This approach is compared on both WMAP simulations and data with the standard local χ2 minimization, modelling the background as a low-order polynomial. The proposed approach generally leads to 1) lower biases in flux recovery; 2) an improved root mean-square error of up to 35%; and 3) more robustness to background fluctuations at the scale of the source. The WMAP 9-year point-source-subtracted maps are available online.

PRISM: Sparse recovery of the primordial spectrum from WMAP9 and Planck datasets

The primordial power spectrum is an indirect probe of inflation or other structure-formation mechanisms. We introduce a new method, named \textbf{PRISM}, to estimate this spectrum from the empirical cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum. This is a sparsity-based inversion method, which leverages a sparsity prior on features in the primordial spectrum in a wavelet dictionary to regularise the inverse problem. This non-parametric approach is able to reconstruct the global shape as well as localised features of spectrum accurately and proves to be robust for detecting deviations from the currently favoured scale-invariant spectrum. We investigate the strength of this method on a set of WMAP nine-year simulated data for three types of primordial spectra and then process the WMAP nine-year data as well as the Planck PR1 data. We find no significant departures from a near scale-invariant spectrum.

Polarized cosmic microwave background map recovery with sparse component separation

The polarization modes of the cosmological microwave background are an invaluable source of information for cosmology, and a unique window to probe the energy scale of inflation. Extracting such information from microwave surveys requires disentangling between foreground emissions and the cosmological signal, which boils down to solving a component separation problem. Component separation techniques have been widely studied for the recovery of CMB temperature anisotropies but quite rarely for the polarization modes. In this case, most component separation techniques make use of second-order statistics to discriminate between the various components. More recent methods, which rather emphasize on the sparsity of the components in the wavelet domain, have been shown to provide low-foreground, full-sky estimate of the CMB temperature anisotropies. Building on sparsity, the present paper introduces a new component separation technique dubbed PolGMCA (Polarized Generalized Morphological Component Analysis), which refines previous work to specifically tackle the estimation of the polarized CMB maps: i) it benefits from a recently introduced sparsity-based mechanism to cope with partially correlated components, ii) it builds upon estimator aggregation techniques to further yield a better noise contamination/non-Gaussian foreground residual trade-off. The PolGMCA algorithm is evaluated on simulations of full-sky polarized microwave sky simulations using the Planck Sky Model (PSM), which show that the proposed method achieve a precise recovery of the CMB map in polarization with low noise/foreground contamination residuals. It provides improvements with respect to standard methods, especially on the galactic center where estimating the CMB is challenging.The polarization modes of the cosmological microwave background are an invaluable source of information for cosmology and a unique window to probe the energy scale of inflation. Extracting this information from microwave surveys requires distinguishing between foreground emissions and the cosmological signal, which means solving a component separation problem. Component separation techniques have been widely studied for the recovery of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies, but very rarely for the polarization modes. In this case, most component separation techniques make use of second-order statistics to distinguish between the various components. More recent methods, which instead emphasize the sparsity of the components in the wavelet domain, have been shown to provide low-foreground, full-sky estimates of the CMB temperature anisotropies. Building on sparsity, we here introduce a new component separation technique dubbed the polarized generalized morphological component analysis (PolGMCA), which refines previous work to specifically work on the estimation of the polarized CMB maps: i) it benefits from a recently introduced sparsity-based mechanism to cope with partially correlated components; ii) it builds upon estimator aggregation techniques to further yield a better noise contamination/non-Gaussian foreground residual trade-off. The PolGMCA algorithm is evaluated on simulations of full-sky polarized microwave sky simulations using the Planck Sky Model (PSM). The simulations show that the proposed method achieves a precise recovery of the CMB map in polarization with low-noise and foreground contamination residuals. It provides improvements over standard methods, especially on the Galactic center, where estimating the CMB is challenging.

Sparsity and cosmology: inverse problems in cosmic microwave background experiments

We propose a new method to better estimate and subtract the contribution of detected compact sources to the microwave sky. These bright compact source emissions contaminate the full-sky data over a significant fraction of the sky, and should therefore be accurately removed if a high resolution and full-sky estimate of the components is sought after. However the point source spectral variability hampers accurate blind source separation, even with state-of-the-art localized source separation techniques. In this work, we rather propose to estimate the flux of the brightest compact sources using a morphological separation approach, relying on a more sophisticated model for the background than in standard approaches. Essentially, this amounts to separate point sources with known support and shape from a background assumed sparse in the spherical harmonic domain. This approach is compared to standard local χ2 minimization modeling the background as a low order polynomial on WMAP realistic simulations. If in noisy situations estimating more than a few parameter does not improve flux recovery, in the first WMAP channels the proposed method leads to lower biases (typically by factors of 2) and increased robustness.

CMB Map Restoration

Estimating the cosmological microwave background is of utmost importance for cosmology. However, its estimation from full-sky surveys such as WMAP or more recently Planck is challenging: CMB maps are generally estimated via the application of some source separation techniques which never prevent the final map from being contaminated with noise and foreground residuals. These spurious contaminations whether noise or foreground residuals are well known to be a plague for most cosmologically relevant tests or evaluations; this includes CMB lensing reconstruction or non-Gaussian signatures search. Noise reduction is generally performed by applying a simple Wiener filter in spherical harmonics; however, this does not account for the non-stationarity of the noise. Foreground contamination is usually tackled by masking the most intense residuals detected in the map, which makes CMB evaluation harder to perform. In this paper, we introduce a novel noise reduction framework coined LIW-Filtering for Linear Iterative Wavelet Filtering which is able to account for the noise spatial variability thanks to a wavelet-based modeling while keeping the highly desired linearity of the Wiener filter. We further show that the same filtering technique can effectively perform foreground contamination reduction thus providing a globally cleaner CMB map. Numerical results on simulated Planck data are provided.