On the suspected timing error in WMAP map-making

TL;DR

This paper investigates a suspected timing error in WMAP map-making, using image sharpness metrics to reject the hypothesis of a specific timing offset, thus questioning previous assumptions about the data processing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of assessing timing errors in WMAP data by analyzing the sharpness of bright foreground object images across different timing offsets.

Findings

Rejects the -25.6 ms timing offset hypothesis at 4.6σ significance.

Demonstrates that the WMAP data processing likely contains a timing error affecting the quadrupole signal.

Suggests that a timing error during calibration cannot be ruled out.

Abstract

A large fraction of the previously estimated WMAP CMB quadrupole signal would be an artefact of incorrect Doppler dipole subtraction if the hypothesis of a small timing interpolation error were correct. Observations of bright foreground objects constitute part of the time-ordered-data (TOD). Scans of an object in different directions should be shifted by the would-be timing error, causing a blurring effect. Three half-years of the calibrated, filtered WMAP TOD are compiled individually for the four W band differencing assemblies (DA's), with no masking of bright objects, giving 12 maps for each timing offset. Percentiles of the temperature-fluctuation distribution in each map at HEALPix resolution N_side=2048 are used to determine the dependence of all-sky image sharpness on the timing offset. In the W band, the 99.999% percentile, i.e. the temperature fluctuation in the approx 503-rd brightest pixel, is the least noisy percentile. Using this statistic, the hypothesis that a -25.6 ms offset relative to the timing adopted by the WMAP collaboration gives a focus at least as sharp as the uncorrected timing is rejected at 4.6\sigma significance. The Q and V band maps also reject the -25.6 ms offset hypothesis at high statistical significance. The requirement that the correct choice of timing offset must maximise image sharpness implies that the hypothesis of a timing error in the WMAP collaboration's compilation of the WMAP calibrated, filtered TOD is rejected at high statistical significance in each of the Q, V and W wavebands. However, the hypothesis that a timing error was applied during calibration of the raw TOD, leading to a dipole-induced difference signal, is not excluded by this method.