Time-ordered data simulation and map-making for the PIXIE Fourier transform spectrometer

TL;DR

This paper presents a simulator and map-maker for the PIXIE Fourier transform spectrometer, analyzing the impact of various instrumental effects on data quality, and finds that mirror jitter is the most critical factor affecting performance.

Contribution

The authors develop a comprehensive simulation and map-making pipeline for PIXIE, assessing the effects of instrumental imperfections on data analysis.

Findings

PIXIE is robust to polarization leakage, collimation errors, elliptical beams, sub-pixel effects, and correlated noise.

Mirror jitter is identified as the main source of potential noise if not controlled.

The source code for the simulator and map-maker is publicly available.

Abstract

We develop a time-ordered data simulator and map-maker for the proposed PIXIE Fourier transform spectrometer and use them to investigate the impact of polarization leakage, imperfect collimation, elliptical beams, sub-pixel effects, correlated noise and spectrometer mirror jitter on the PIXIE data analysis. We find that PIXIE is robust to all of these effects, with the exception of mirror jitter which could become the dominant source of noise in the experiment if the jitter is not kept significantly below $0.1\mu m\sqrt{s}$. Source code is available at https://github.com/amaurea/pixie.