Summary of Models

This page contains high-level description of the models available within the mapsims package, this models are specific to the Simons Observatory, more general PySM models are instead available in the so_pysm_models package, see the documentation about those models.

20180822 noise power spectra and hitmaps

The SONoiseSimulator class provides a wrapper to call the software that was released on 20180822 to simulate power spectra of the noise taking into account the expected performance of the whole experiment. The noise simulator accepts a number of parameters to configure the simulation, see the documentation of the class of the source code of the noise spectra simulator included in the repository.

It also includes low-resolution simulated relative hitmaps for the “classical” and the “opportunistic” scanning strategies.

As an example:

from mapsims import noise
import healpy as hp
noise_sim = noise.SONoiseSimulator(telescope="LA", band=27, nside=128)
hp.mollview(noise_sim.hitmap, title="Relative hitmap")
noise_map = m = noise_sim.simulate()
hp.mollview(noise_map[1], min=-100, max=100, unit="uK_CMB", title="Q noise map LA 27")

Cosmic Microwave Background simulations

The so_pysm_models package provides a generic so_pysm_models.PrecomputedAlms PySM component that can load a set of \(a_{\ell m}\) coefficients and generate a map at the requested \(N_{side}\).

mapsims has 2 classes that derive from PrecomputedAlms:

  • SOPrecomputedCMB provides a specific naming convention tailored to the Simons Observatory simulations that are already available

  • SOStandalonePrecomputedCMB is useful to simulate CMB only maps, in this case it is wasteful to use PySM because it first creates a map and then performs other 2 spherical harmonics transforms to apply the beam smoothing. This class instead keeps the input in spherical harmonics domain, first applies the beam and then returns a map. The SOStandalonePrecomputedCMB.simulate(ch)() method gets a Channel object and returns a map already convolved with the channel’s beam.

Available Cosmic Microwave Background simulations

Lensed CMB

Available at NERSC at: /global/project/projectdirs/sobs/v4_sims/mbs/cmb

  • Input theory spectrum and parameters: The input spectra are based on a best-fit Planck cosmology. The unlensed power spectra are available at https://github.com/ACTCollaboration/actsims/blob/master/data/cosmo2017_10K_acc3_scalCls.dat. The maps are generated at \(\ell_{max}\) = 8000 but are saved only at \(\ell_{max}\) = 5100 (to save disk space).

  • The lensing (i.e. kappa or phi) maps are Gaussian random fields obtained with the same cosmology. The lensing is done at one-arcminute resolution using the routine pixell.lensing.rand_map(). We pass separate random seeds to make the CMB and phi maps, meaning that there is no correlation between T and phi (or E and phi) arising from the ISW effect (this might have an impact for people studying primordial non-Gaussianity).

  • The lensed power spectra, which represent the lensed maps to a very good approximation are at https://github.com/ACTCollaboration/actsims/blob/master/data/cosmo2017_10K_acc3_lensedCls.dat

  • There are no primordial B modes (and similarly no contribution from tensors to the T maps).

  • See all the cosmological parameters used in the CAMB configuration file