Harmonic Inpainting of the Cosmic Microwave Background Sky: Formulation and Error Estimate

Abstract

We develop a new interpolation scheme, based on harmonic inpainting, for reconstructing the cosmic microwave background temperature data within the Galaxy mask from the data outside the mask. We find that, for scale-invariant isotropic random Gaussian fluctuations, the developed algorithm reduces the errors in the reconstructed map for the odd-parity modes significantly for azimuthally symmetric masks with constant galactic latitudes. For a more realistic Galaxy mask, we find a modest improvement in the even-parity modes as well.

8 pages, 6 figures, Minor change, Discusssion about the Gaussian noise in the WMAP data is added in footnotes

References in corpus (6)

• Three-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Temperature Analysis
• Ellipsoidal Universe Can Solve The CMB Quadrupole Problem
• Local Voids as the Origin of Large-angle Cosmic Microwave Background Anomalies I
• The Axis of Evil revisited
• Local Voids as the Origin of Large-angle Cosmic Microwave Background Anomalies: The Effect of a Cosmological Constant
• Estimation of Polarized Power Spectra by Gibbs sampling

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Planck CMB Anomalies: Astrophysical and Cosmological Secondary Effects and the Curse of Masking
• A close examination of cosmic microwave background mirror-parity after Planck
• CMB-PAInT: An inpainting tool for the cosmic microwave background
• Removing the mask -- reconstructing a scalar field on the sphere from a masked field