User:Ceyockey/sandbox Saskatoon experiment work

this is a place to collate content which might make it into the article Saskatoon experiment

In the article @ http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0204021.pdf, the following passage appears in the Introduction: "In Section III, we compute the strongest observational constraints to date on rℓ by cross-correlating the polarized Princeton IQU Experiment (PIQUE) [5] with the unpolarized Saskatoon (SK) [6] data set."

This suggests a fundamental difference between CMB experiments in terms of "polarization", which I do not understand at this point. Reference 6 is "C. B. Netterfield et al., ApJ 474, 47 (1997)".

In the article @ http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0104419.pdf it is noted that data from QMAP and Saskatoon "agree well overall", allowing the data from the two to be combined to form the "QMASK" CMB Map, which was described in 2002 as being "the largest area CMB map publicly available to date with degree scale angular resolution."

An apparently important consideration in CMB measurement is the degree of foreground contamination ("true features on the microwave sky") and the measurement of this for particular experiments. From http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0104419.pdf: "The foreground contamination [26] has been previously quantified for both Saskatoon [27] and QMAP [28], by cross-correlating the maps in question with a foreground templates tracing synchrotron, dust and free-free emission, point sources, etc."

Reference 26 is "M. Tegmark, D. J. Eisenstein, W. Hu, and A. de OliveiraCosta, ApJ 530, 133 (2000)." Reference 27 is "A. de Oliveira-Costa, A. Kogut, M. J. Devlin, C. B. Netterfield, L. A. Page, E. J. Wollack, ApJ 482, L17 (1997)."