A fast map-making preconditioner for regular scanning patterns

Abstract

High-resolution Maximum Likelihood map-making of the Cosmic Microwave Background is usually performed using Conjugate Gradients with a preconditioner that ignores noise correlations. We here present a new preconditioner that approximates the map noise covariance as circulant, and show that this results in a speedup of up to 400% for a realistic scanning pattern from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. The improvement is especially large for polarized maps.