Final Report Summary - CMBFOREGROUNDS (Accurate foreground characterisation for future CMB experiments.)
The project is about understanding and removing foreground contamination for current future CMB experiments. Dickinson is a leader in this area as demonstrated by their publications and record. Dickinson has published 58 articles during the grant period. The researcher has made significant progress in understanding the diffuse foregrounds as well as their impact on component separation. Highlights include definitive measurements of the Anomalous Microwave Emission (AME) and understanding it in terms of electric dipole radiation from spinning dust grains. This work was done within the Planck collaboration and the researcher led this work/paper as well as the entire Planck team.
Outside of Planck, the C-Band All-Sky Survey (C-BASS) is a major experiment that aims to map the entire sky at 5 GHz in intensity and polarisation. As part of the IRG, a PhD student (Melis Irfan) was enrolled. Irfan has become an integral part of the C-BASS team, a collaboration between Manchester, Oxford, Caltech and South African institutes. She has helped to built and test the sensitive receivers employed on C-BASS and has made regular visits to both the California and South African sites. Irfan has become one of the experts on the data reduction for C-BASS and, in particular, in understanding the ground spillover which is a major limitation for producing maps. Irfan has recently produced the first reliable maps in polarisation (see http://www.astro.caltech.edu/cbass/ for pictures) that begin to show the faint synchrotron features in the sky. We are now confident that we can produce reliable maps to the community in the next 1-2 years. Irfan will be a co-author to all the C-BASS project papers (the northern instrument paper is the first to be submitted, first author Oliver King) and is preparing her first science paper to be submitted in early 2014. This will contain a first analysis of the synchrotron/free-free/AME components by combining C-BASS with WMAP/Planck data. The C-BASS dataset will be a major resource for the astronomical community for years to come.
Outside of Planck, the C-Band All-Sky Survey (C-BASS) is a major experiment that aims to map the entire sky at 5 GHz in intensity and polarisation. As part of the IRG, a PhD student (Melis Irfan) was enrolled. Irfan has become an integral part of the C-BASS team, a collaboration between Manchester, Oxford, Caltech and South African institutes. She has helped to built and test the sensitive receivers employed on C-BASS and has made regular visits to both the California and South African sites. Irfan has become one of the experts on the data reduction for C-BASS and, in particular, in understanding the ground spillover which is a major limitation for producing maps. Irfan has recently produced the first reliable maps in polarisation (see http://www.astro.caltech.edu/cbass/ for pictures) that begin to show the faint synchrotron features in the sky. We are now confident that we can produce reliable maps to the community in the next 1-2 years. Irfan will be a co-author to all the C-BASS project papers (the northern instrument paper is the first to be submitted, first author Oliver King) and is preparing her first science paper to be submitted in early 2014. This will contain a first analysis of the synchrotron/free-free/AME components by combining C-BASS with WMAP/Planck data. The C-BASS dataset will be a major resource for the astronomical community for years to come.