69 research outputs found
Baryon acoustic oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations: Radio frequency interference measurements and telescope site selection
The Baryon acoustic oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations
(BINGO) telescope is a new 40-m class radio telescope to measure the
large-angular-scale intensity of Hi emission at 980-1260 MHz to constrain dark
energy parameters. As it needs to measure faint cosmological signals at the
milliKelvin level, it requires a site that has very low radio frequency
interference (RFI) at frequencies around 1 GHz. We report on measurement
campaigns across Uruguay and Brazil to find a suitable site, which looked at
the strength of the mobile phone signals and other radio transmissions, the
location of wind turbines, and also included mapping airplane flight paths. The
site chosen for the BINGO telescope is a valley at Serra do Urubu, a remote
part of Paraiba in North-East Brazil, which has sheltering terrain. During our
measurements with a portable receiver we did not detect any RFI in or near the
BINGO band, given the sensitivity of the equipment. A radio quiet zone around
the selected site has been requested to the Brazilian authorities ahead of the
telescope construction.Comment: Preprint of an article accepted in the Journal of Astronomical
Instrumentation, copyright 2018 World Scientific Publishing Company
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/ja
Cosmoglobe DR1. III. First full-sky model of polarized synchrotron emission from all WMAP and Planck LFI data
We present the first model of full-sky polarized synchrotron emission that is
derived from all WMAP and Planck LFI frequency maps. The basis of this analysis
is the set of end-to-end reprocessed Cosmoglobe Data Release 1 sky maps
presented in a companion paper, which have significantly lower instrumental
systematics than the legacy products from each experiment. We find that the
resulting polarized synchrotron amplitude map has an average noise rms of
at 30 GHz and FWHM, which is 30% lower than
the recently released BeyondPlanck model that included only LFI+WMAP Ka-V data,
and 29% lower than the WMAP K-band map alone. The mean -to- power
spectrum ratio is , with amplitudes consistent with those measured
previously by Planck and QUIJOTE. Assuming a power law model for the
synchrotron spectral energy distribution, and using the -- plot method,
we find a full-sky inverse noise-variance weighted mean of
between Cosmoglobe DR1 K-band and 30 GHz, in
good agreement with previous estimates. In summary, the novel Cosmoglobe DR1
synchrotron model is both more sensitive and systematically cleaner than
similar previous models, and it has a more complete error description that is
defined by a set of Monte Carlo posterior samples. We believe that these
products are preferable over previous Planck and WMAP products for all
synchrotron-related scientific applications, including simulation, forecasting
and component separation.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures, submitted to A&
Cosmoglobe: Towards end-to-end CMB cosmological parameter estimation without likelihood approximations
We implement support for a cosmological parameter estimation algorithm as
proposed by Racine et al. (2016) in Commander, and quantify its computational
efficiency and cost. For a semi-realistic simulation similar to Planck LFI 70
GHz, we find that the computational cost of producing one single sample is
about 60 CPU-hours and that the typical Markov chain correlation length is
100 samples. The net effective cost per independent sample is 6 000
CPU-hours, in comparison with all low-level processing costs of 812 CPU-hours
for Planck LFI and WMAP in Cosmoglobe Data Release 1. Thus, although
technically possible to run already in its current state, future work should
aim to reduce the effective cost per independent sample by at least one order
of magnitude to avoid excessive runtimes, for instance through multi-grid
preconditioners and/or derivative-based Markov chain sampling schemes. This
work demonstrates the computational feasibility of true Bayesian cosmological
parameter estimation with end-to-end error propagation for high-precision CMB
experiments without likelihood approximations, but it also highlights the need
for additional optimizations before it is ready for full production-level
analysis.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to A&
Cosmoglobe DR1 results. II. Constraints on isotropic cosmic birefringence from reprocessed WMAP and Planck LFI data
Cosmic birefringence is a parity-violating effect that might have rotated the
plane of linearly polarized light of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by
an angle since its emission. This has recently been measured to be
non-zero at a statistical significance of in the official Planck
PR4 and 9-year WMAP data. In this work, we constrain using the
reprocessed BeyondPlanck LFI and Cosmoglobe DR1 WMAP polarization maps. These
novel maps have both lower systematic residuals and a more complete error
description than the corresponding official products. Foreground
correlations could bias measurements of , and while thermal dust
emission has been argued to be statistically non-zero, no evidence for
synchrotron power has been reported. Unlike the dust-dominated Planck HFI
maps, the majority of the LFI and WMAP polarization maps are instead dominated
by synchrotron emission. Simultaneously constraining and the
polarization miscalibration angle, , of each channel, we find a
best-fit value of with LFI and WMAP data
only. When including the Planck HFI PR4 maps, but fitting separately
for dust-dominated, , and synchrotron-dominated
channels, , we find . This differs from zero with a
statistical significance of , and the main contribution to this
value comes from the LFI 70 GHz channel. While the statistical significances of
these results are low on their own, the measurement derived from the LFI and
WMAP synchrotron-dominated maps agrees with the previously reported
HFI-dominated constraints, despite the very different astrophysical and
instrumental systematics involved in all these experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to A&
BeyondPlanck IV. On end-to-end simulations in CMB analysis -- Bayesian versus frequentist statistics
End-to-end simulations play a key role in the analysis of any
high-sensitivity CMB experiment, providing high-fidelity systematic error
propagation capabilities unmatched by any other means. In this paper, we
address an important issue regarding such simulations, namely how to define the
inputs in terms of sky model and instrument parameters. These may either be
taken as a constrained realization derived from the data, or as a random
realization independent from the data. We refer to these as Bayesian and
frequentist simulations, respectively. We show that the two options lead to
significantly different correlation structures, as frequentist simulations,
contrary to Bayesian simulations, effectively include cosmic variance, but
exclude realization-specific correlations from non-linear degeneracies.
Consequently, they quantify fundamentally different types of uncertainties, and
we argue that they therefore also have different and complementary scientific
uses, even if this dichotomy is not absolute. Before BeyondPlanck, most
pipelines have used a mix of constrained and random inputs, and used the same
hybrid simulations for all applications, even though the statistical
justification for this is not always evident. BeyondPlanck represents the first
end-to-end CMB simulation framework that is able to generate both types of
simulations, and these new capabilities have brought this topic to the
forefront. The Bayesian BeyondPlanck simulations and their uses are described
extensively in a suite of companion papers. In this paper we consider one
important applications of the corresponding frequentist simulations, namely
code validation. That is, we generate a set of 1-year LFI 30 GHz frequentist
simulations with known inputs, and use these to validate the core low-level
BeyondPlanck algorithms; gain estimation, correlated noise estimation, and
mapmaking
Strangelet search at RHIC
Two position sensitive Shower Maximum Detector (SMDs) for Zero-Degree
Calorimeters (ZDCs) were installed by STAR before run 2004 at both upstream and
downstream from the interaction point along the beam axis where particles with
small rigidity are swept away by strong magnetic field. The ZDC-SMDs provides
information about neutral energy deposition as a function of transverse
position in ZDCs. We report the preliminary results of strangelet search from a
triggered data-set sampling 100 million Au+Au collisions at top RHIC energy.Comment: Strange Quark Matter 2004 conference proceedin
Multiplicity and Pseudorapidity Distributions of Charged Particles and Photons at Forward Pseudorapidity in Au + Au Collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 62.4 GeV
We present the centrality dependent measurement of multiplicity and
pseudorapidity distributions of charged particles and photons in Au + Au
collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 62.4 GeV. The charged particles and photons are
measured in the pseudorapidity region 2.9 < eta < 3.9 and 2.3 < eta < 3.7,
respectively. We have studied the scaling of particle production with the
number of participating nucleons and the number of binary collisions. The
photon and charged particle production in the measured pseudorapidity range has
been shown to be consistent with energy independent limiting fragmentation
behavior. The photons are observed to follow a centrality independent limiting
fragmentation behavior while for the charged particles it is centrality
dependent. We have carried out a comparative study of the pseudorapidity
distributions of positively charged hadrons, negatively charged hadrons,
photons, pions, net protons in nucleus--nucleus collisions and pseudorapidity
distributions from p+p collisions. From these comparisons we conclude that
baryons in the inclusive charged particle distribution are responsible for the
observed centrality dependence of limiting fragmentation. The mesons are found
to follow an energy independent behavior of limiting fragmentation while the
behavior of baryons seems to be energy dependent.Comment: 17 pages and 20 figure
Growth of Long Range Forward-Backward Multiplicity Correlations with Centrality in Au+Au Collisions at = 200 GeV
Forward-backward multiplicity correlation strengths have been measured with
the STAR detector for Au+Au and collisions at =
200 GeV. Strong short and long range correlations (LRC) are seen in central
Au+Au collisions. The magnitude of these correlations decrease with decreasing
centrality until only short range correlations are observed in peripheral Au+Au
collisions. Both the Dual Parton Model (DPM) and the Color Glass Condensate
(CGC) predict the existence of the long range correlations. In the DPM the
fluctuation in the number of elementary (parton) inelastic collisions produces
the LRC. In the CGC longitudinal color flux tubes generate the LRC. The data is
in qualitative agreement with the predictions from the DPM and indicates the
presence of multiple parton interactions.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures The abstract has been slightly modifie
Forward Neutral Pion Transverse Single Spin Asymmetries in p+p Collisions at \sqrt{s}=200 GeV
We report precision measurements of the Feynman-x dependence, and first
measurements of the transverse momentum dependence, of transverse single spin
asymmetries for the production of \pi^0 mesons from polarized proton collisions
at \sqrt{s}=200 GeV. The x_F dependence of the results is in fair agreement
with perturbative QCD model calculations that identify orbital motion of quarks
and gluons within the proton as the origin of the spin effects. Results for the
p_T dependence at fixed x_F are not consistent with pQCD-based calculations.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
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