A fast and accurate algorithm for spherical harmonic analysis on HEALPix grids with applications to the cosmic microwave background radiation

DOI10.1016/J.JCP.2020.109544zbMATH Open1437.65251arXiv1904.10514OpenAlexW3024741015MaRDI QIDQ781995FDOQ781995

Grady B. Wright, Kathryn P. Drake

Publication date: 21 July 2020

Published in: Journal of Computational Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelation (HEALPix) scheme is used extensively in astrophysics for data collection and analysis on the sphere. The scheme was originally designed for studying the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, which represents the first light to travel during the early stages of the universe's development and gives the strongest evidence for the Big Bang theory to date. Refined analysis of the CMB angular power spectrum can lead to revolutionary developments in understanding the nature of dark matter and dark energy. In this paper, we present a new method for performing spherical harmonic analysis for HEALPix data, which is a central component to computing and analyzing the angular power spectrum of the massive CMB data sets. The method uses a novel combination of a non-uniform fast Fourier transform, the double Fourier sphere method, and Slevinsky's fast spherical harmonic transform (Slevinsky, 2019). For a HEALPix grid with $N$ pixels (points), the computational complexity of the method is $mathcalO(Nlo{g}^{2}N)$, with an initial set-up cost of $mathcalO(N^{3/2}logN)$. This compares favorably with $mathcalO(N^{3/2})$ runtime complexity of the current methods available in the HEALPix software when multiple maps need to be analyzed at the same time. Using numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the new method also appears to provide better accuracy over the entire angular power spectrum of synthetic data when compared to the current methods, with a convergence rate at least two times higher.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10514

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zbMATH Keywords

nonuniform fast Fourier transformcosmic microwave background radiationdouble Fourier spherefast spherical harmonic transformHEALPix

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Astrophysical cosmology (85A40) Numerical methods for discrete and fast Fourier transforms (65T50) Applications to the sciences (65Z05)

Cites Work

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Cited In (3)

• Approximation properties of the double Fourier sphere method
• A double Fourier sphere method for \(d\)-dimensional manifolds
• Fast spin \(\pm \)2 spherical harmonics transforms and application in cosmology

Uses Software

• LSQR
• Healpix
• IGLOO
• FastTransforms.jl
• CRAIG

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