ABSTRACT
We present a novel technique for cosmic microwave background (CMB) foreground subtraction based on the framework of blind source separation. Inspired by previous work incorporating local ...variation to generalized morphological component analysis (GMCA), we introduce hierarchical GMCA (HGMCA), a Bayesian hierarchical graphical model for source separation. We test our method on Nside = 256 simulated sky maps that include dust, synchrotron, free–free, and anomalous microwave emission, and show that HGMCA reduces foreground contamination by $25{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ over GMCA in both the regions included and excluded by the Planck UT78 mask, decreases the error in the measurement of the CMB temperature power spectrum to the 0.02–0.03 per cent level at ℓ > 200 (and $\lt 0.26{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ for all ℓ), and reduces correlation to all the foregrounds. We find equivalent or improved performance when compared to state-of-the-art internal linear combination type algorithms on these simulations, suggesting that HGMCA may be a competitive alternative to foreground separation techniques previously applied to observed CMB data. Additionally, we show that our performance does not suffer when we perturb model parameters or alter the CMB realization, which suggests that our algorithm generalizes well beyond our simplified simulations. Our results open a new avenue for constructing CMB maps through Bayesian hierarchical analysis.
Strong lensing is a sensitive probe of the small-scale density fluctuations in the Universe. We implement a pipeline to model strongly lensed systems using probabilistic cataloging, which is a ...transdimensional, hierarchical, and Bayesian framework to sample from a metamodel (union of models with different dimensionality) consistent with observed photon count maps. Probabilistic cataloging allows one to robustly characterize modeling covariances within and across lens models with different numbers of subhalos. Unlike traditional cataloging of subhalos, it does not require model subhalos to improve the goodness of fit above the detection threshold. Instead, it allows the exploitation of all information contained in the photon count maps-for instance, when constraining the subhalo mass function. We further show that, by not including these small subhalos in the lens model, fixed-dimensional inference methods can significantly mismodel the data. Using a simulated Hubble Space Telescope data set, we show that the subhalo mass function can be probed even when many subhalos in the sample catalogs are individually below the detection threshold and would be absent in a traditional catalog. The implemented software, Probabilistic Cataloger (PCAT) is made publicly available at https://github.com/tdaylan/pcat.
We consider the cross-correlation between free electrons and neutral hydrogen during the epoch of reionization (EoR). The free electrons are traced by the optical depth to reionization τ, while the ...neutral hydrogen can be observed through 21 cm photon emission. As expected, this correlation is sensitive to the detailed physics of reionization. Foremost, if reionization occurs through the merger of relatively large halos hosting an ionizing source, the free electrons and neutral hydrogen are anticorrelated for most of the reionization history. A positive contribution to the correlation can occur when the halos that can form an ionizing source are small. A measurement of this sign change in the cross-correlation could help disentangle the bias and the ionization history. We estimate the signal-to-noise ratio of the cross-correlation using the estimator for inhomogeneous reionization τ-hat {sub ℓm} proposed by Dvorkin and Smith. We find that with upcoming radio interferometers and cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, the cross-correlation is measurable going up to multipoles ℓ ∼ 1000. We also derive parameter constraints and conclude that, despite the foregrounds, the cross-correlation provides a complementary measurement of the EoR parameters to the 21 cm and CMB polarization autocorrelations expected to be observed in the coming decade.
PDF
