No Higher Criticism of the Bianchi-corrected Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data

Higher Criticism (HC) has been proposed by Donoho & Jin as an effective statistic to detect deviations from Gaussianity. Motivated by the success of the Bianchi VII_h model in addressing many of the anomalies observed in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ( WMAP ) data (Jaffe et al.), we present calculations in real and in wavelet space of the HC statistic of the Bianchi-corrected WMAP first-year data. At the wavelet scale of 5°, the HC of the WMAP map drops from a value above the 99 per cent confidence level (c.l.) to a value below the 68 per cent CL when corrected by the Bianchi template. An important property of the HC statistic is its ability to locate the pixels that account for the deviation from Gaussianity. The analysis of the uncorrected WMAP data pointed to a cold spot in the Southern hemisphere, centred at   l ∼ 209°, b ∼−57°  . The HC of the Bianchi-corrected map indicates that this spot remains prominent, albeit at a level completely consistent with Gaussian statistics. Consequently, it is debatable how much emphasis should be placed on this residual feature, but we consider the effect of modestly increasing the scaling of the template. A factor of only 1.2 renders the spot indistinguishable from the background level, with no noticeable impact on the results published in Jaffe et al. for the low- l anomalies, large-scale power asymmetry or wavelet kurtosis. A trivial interpretation would be that the Bianchi template may require a small enhancement of power on scales corresponding to the wavelet scale of 5°.     

A semianalytical method for calculating the parameters of the electromagnetic halos around extragalactic gamma-ray sources

The ultrahigh-energy (>20 TeV ) gamma rays emitted by active galactic nuclei can be absorbed in intergalactic space through the production of electron-positron pairs during their interaction with extragalactic background photon fields. The electrons and positrons produced by this interaction form an electromagnetic halo. We have studied the halo formation and calculated the halo radiation spectrum. The magnetic field in the halo formation region is assumed to be strong enough for the electron velocities to be isotropized. For such fields, the halo formation process can be described by the method of generations. We calculated the synchrotron and Compton backscattering radiation spectra for the total halo luminosity. We obtained the spatial distribution of the radiation for a point gamma-ray source.     

Separation of instrumental and astrophysical foregrounds for mapping cosmic microwave background anisotropies

For the most sensitive present and future experiments dedicated to cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy observations, the identification and separation of signals coming from different sources is an important step in the data analysis. This problem of the restitution of signals from the observation of their mixture is classically called 'component separation' in CMB mapping. In this paper, we address the general problem of separating, for millimetre-wave sky-mapping applications, components which include not only astrophysical emissions in two-dimensional maps, but also one-dimensional instrumental effects in the data streams. We show that component separation methods can be adapted to separate simultaneously both astrophysical emissions and components coming from time-dependent foreground signals which originate from the instrument itself. Such general methods can be used for the optimal processing of low-redundancy observations where multi-channel observations are a precious tool to remove systematic effects, as may be the case for the Planck mission.