PDRs4All XX. Haute Couture: Spectral stitching of JWST MIRI-IFU cubes with matrix completion

TL;DR

This paper introduces Haute Couture, a new spectral stitching algorithm using non-negative matrix factorization to combine JWST MIRI-IFU data cubes into a seamless, high-resolution spectral data cube.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel stitching method that employs matrix completion with NMF and a new pre-processing step for homogenizing intensities across multiple spectral cubes.

Findings

Successfully applied to JWST Orion Bar data

Produced a uniform, high-resolution spectral cube

Improved flux matching across spectral overlaps

Abstract

MIRI is the imager and spectrograph covering wavelengths from $4.9$ to $27.9$ $\mu$m onboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The Medium-Resolution Spectrometer (MRS) consists of four integral field units (IFU), each of which has three sub-channels. The twelve resulting spectral data cubes have different fields of view, spatial, and spectral resolutions. The wavelength range of each cube partially overlaps with the neighboring bands, and the overlap regions typically show flux mismatches which have to be corrected by spectral stitching methods. Stitching methods aim to produce a single data cube incorporating the data of the individual sub-channels, which requires matching the spatial resolution and the flux discrepancies. We present Haute Couture, a novel stitching algorithm which uses non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to perform a matrix completion, where the available MRS data cubes are treated as twelve sub-matrices of a larger incomplete matrix. Prior to matrix completion, we also introduce a novel pre-processing to homogenize the global intensities of the twelve cubes. Our pre-processing consists in jointly optimizing a set of global scale parameters that maximize the fit between the cubes where spectral overlap occurs. We apply our novel stitching method to JWST data obtained as part of the PDRs4All observing program of the Orion Bar, and produce a uniform cube reconstructed with the best spatial resolution over the full range of wavelengths.