![]() | Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 1994. 32:
319-70 Copyright © 1994 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved |
4.2. Window Functions
It has become conventional to describe the details of the instrument
and the observing strategy in terms of a window function
W which
describes the sensitivity of the experiment to the modes of the
spherical harmonic decomposition of the CMB temperature
fluctuations. The signal seen by any experiment can then be considered
as the convolution of the sky power and the window function
![]() | (27) |
If one takes an ensemble average (over universes) of this expression, then
a2
<a
2>
= (2
+
1)C
. Often
this ensemble average is assumed when the window function is computed.
The simplest and most common window function is that due to finite
beam resolution. As expected, finite resolution introduces a
high-
cutoff. If the beam has a Gaussian response with a Gaussian width of
, the window function is
(see e.g.
Silk & Wilson 1980,
Bond & Efstathiou 1984,
White 1992)
![]() | (28) |
For an experiment that measures temperatures by differencing 2- or 3-beam setups, the window functions, in addition to the beam smoothing factor, are (see e.g. Bond & Efstathiou 1987)
![]() | (29) |
where is the angle
between the beams. Note that these types of
experiments are not sensitive to the
low-
modes of the multipole
expansion because of the differencing. Since the
high-
cutoff is
controlled by the beam width while the separation (or chop) controls
the low-
behavior, one can
increase both the width and height of the
window function by separating these scales as much as possible.
Such a double- or triple-beam differencing strategy is often called a square wave chop. There are, however, other scan strategies that have been used. Several experiments (in particular South Pole, Saskatoon, and MAX) use a sine wave chop, moving the beam continuously back and forth across the sky, sinusoidally in time. Additionally, the temperature is weighted by ± 1 or by a harmonic of the chop frequency. The resulting time-integrated, weighted temperature is then the "difference" assigned to that point on the sky. Window functions for these experiments can be found in Bond et al (1991b), Dodelson & Jubas (1993), White et al (1993), and Bunn et a1 (1994b). [The window function for MAX, given in White et al (1993), should be multiplied by 1.13 to account for the finite size of the beam on the calibration: see Srednicki et al (1993).] There are also several interferometer experiments which make maps of the intensity of the radiation on small patches of the sky [e.g. ATCA (Subrahmanyan et al 1993), VLA (Fomalont et al 1993), and Timbie & Wilkinson (1990)]. The window function for these experiments can be measured as the Fourier transform of the beam pattern and for accuracy needs to be supplied by the experimenters.
We show the window functions vs
for several experiments in
Figure 5. Some numbers describing the functions
shown here are given in
Table 2. Note that the relative heights can have
as much to do with
the treatment of the data as with the sensitivity, i.e. the window
function that is convolved with theory should be consistent with the
observers'
T / T.
It is worth giving an example to illustrate this.
Consider a triple-beam set-up, which consists of the difference of a
difference of two temperatures. The experimenters could choose to
assign a measurement of
T1 - 1/2(T2 + T3)
to a point in direction "1," or they could have chosen to take
2T1 - (T2 + T3).
![]() |
Figure 5. The window functions for large- and medium-scale experiments as a function of multipole. From left to right the experiments are COBE (with 10° smoothing), FIRS, Tenerife, SP91, Saskatoon (dashed), Python (dot-dashed), ARGO, MAX, MSAM (3-beam, dashed). White Dish (Method II, neglecting binning), OVRO, and ATCA, Some parameters of the window functions are displayed in Table 2. |
In the latter case, the window function would be four times larger
and the "measured"
(T /
T)rms would be two times bigger. The difference
in height for the window function would be artificial. While in this
case the difference is quite obvious, in some instances the effects
can be more subtle. Experimentalists must therefore be explicit about
their sampling, weighting, and calibrations before the correct window
functions can be computed.
Experiment | ![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Max |
COBE | - | - | 11 | 1.0 |
FIRS | - | - | 30 | 1.0 |
Ten | 20 | 13 | 30 | 1.0 |
SP91 | 66 | 32 | 109 | 0.9 |
Sask | 71 | 44 | 102 | 1.2 |
Pyth | 73 | 50 | 107 | 1.9 |
ARGO | 107 | 53 | 180 | 0.9 |
MAX | 158 | 78 | 263 | 1.7 |
MSAM2 | 143 | 69 | 234 | 2.1 |
MSAM3 | 249 | 152 | 362 | 0.9 |
a represents the multipole at
the maximum;
![]() ![]() |
Common approximate formulae for the window functions or analysis procedures assume a square wave chop (e.g. Górski 1993, Gundersen et al 1993). This approximation usually does not reproduce the beam pattern on the sky all that well, although it works better for the window function. Even so, such approximation; differ from the exact results, e.g. for MAX the difference between the exact result and (29) is ~ 10% near the peak, and larger off-peak.
Given both a theory and the window function, it is straightforward
to compute the expected rms temperature fluctuation. In
Table 3, we show the predicted
T /
Trms for various experiments,
normalized to A = 1. The predictions assume full sky coverage and an
"average universe,"
though actual experiments may measure different values due to
incomplete sky coverage or cosmic variance (to be discussed later).
It is sometimes possible to define window functions that correspond to off-diagonal elements of the correlation matrix or averages of the form
![]() | (30) |
which are required when fitting data. (Note that this is different
from the sky-averaged correlation function of the COBE group. It is
not an average over our observed sky, but the covariance matrix
required when computing likelihood functions, assuming Gaussian
statistics for the temperature fluctuations.) In general, the window
function approach works well for computing
T /
Trms or for experiments
in which the data span only one dimension (such as the individual
linear scans of the ACME South Pole experiment). In other cases,
however, the data are two-dimensional on the sky and there can be
strong anisotropies in the theoretical covariance matrix which are
difficult to include in this manner. Alternative approaches are then
preferable (see e.g.
Srednicki et al 1993).
Also, if the scanning
strategy or data analysis procedure is sufficiently tortuous, the
window function approach is extremely complicated and simulations of
the scanning, binning, and analysis become necessary. Coarse binning
of data in an experiment which scans smoothly (rather than "stepping")
across the sky is one example of this, where correlations introduced
by the binning will be important.
![]() |
||||||
Experiment | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.03 | 0.06 | 0.10 | |
COBE | 2.57 | 2.62 | 2.63 | 2.63 | 2.64 | |
FIRS | 3.23 | 3.38 | 3.41 | 3.44 | 3.47 | |
Ten | 1.92 | 2.10 | 2.14 | 2.18 | 2.20 | |
SP91 | 2.24 | 2.84 | 3.00 | 3.22 | 3.38 | |
Sask | 2.15 | 2.81 | 2.98 | 3.24 | 3.40 | |
Pyth | 2.69 | 3.84 | 4.10 | 4.49 | 4.76 | |
ARGO | 2.20 | 3.27 | 3.49 | 3.84 | 4.09 | |
MAX | 3.08 | 5.15 | 5.49 | 6.09 | 6.49 | |
MSAM2 | 3.46 | 5.64 | 6.02 | 6.65 | 7.06 | |
MSAM3 | 1.88 | 3.49 | 3.69 | 4.09 | 4.32 | |
a We show the predicted
![]() ![]() ![]() |