Spherical Needlets for CMB Data Analysis

D. Marinucci (1) , D. Pietrobon (2) , A. Balbi (2) , P. Baldi (1, 3) , P. Cabella (4) , G. Kerkyacharian (3, 5) , P. Natoli (2) , D. Picard (3) , N. Vittorio (2)

1 DIPMAT - Dipartimento di Matematica [Roma II]
2 Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata [Roma] = University of Rome Tor Vergata
3 LPMA - Laboratoire de Probabilités et Modèles Aléatoires
4 Oxford Astrophysics
5 MODAL'X - Modélisation aléatoire de Paris X

We discuss Spherical Needlets and their properties. Needlets are a form of spherical wavelets which do not rely on any kind of tangent plane approximation and enjoy good localization properties in both pixel and harmonic space; moreover needlets coefficients are asymptotically uncorrelated at any fixed angular distance, which makes their use in statistical procedures very promising. In view of these properties, we believe needlets may turn out to be especially useful in the analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data on the incomplete sky, as well as of other cosmological observations. As a final advantage, we stress that the implementation of needlets is computationally very convenient and may rely completely on standard data analysis packages such as HEALPix.

Mots clés: data analysis; cosmic microwave background

Domaines: Cosmologie et astrophysique extra-galactique [astro-ph.CO]

D. Marinucci, D. Pietrobon, A. Balbi, P. Baldi, P. Cabella, et al.. Spherical Needlets for CMB Data Analysis. 2007. ⟨hal-00194761⟩