Enhancing Cosmic Microwave Background analysis: implementing frequency-correlated noise in component separation
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a nearly homogeneous radiation that dates back to when the Universe was about 380,000 years old. Its small anisotropies in intensity and polarization serve as a powerful tool for understanding the early stages of the Universe.
A major challenge to the measurement of CMB anisotropies arises from the fact that the observed microwave sky signal is actually a superposition of various astrophysical components.
For computational reasons, component separation analyses are typically performed under the assumption that noise between different frequency channels is uncorrelated. However, accounting for noise correlations is of key importance for current and future generations of CMB experiments measuring such a faint cosmological signal.
In this presentation, I will show how I implemented a more generalized noise model in the component separation software Commander 2, and its application to simulated observations performed by the QUBIC telescope, a bolometric interferometer that, by design, exhibits strong frequency correlations.
