Amplitude-Phase Analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background maps

Abstract

We propose a novel method for the extraction of unresolved point sources from CMB maps. This method is based on the analysis of the phase distribution of the Fourier components for the observed signal and unlike most other methods of denoising does not require any significant assumptions about the expected CMB signal. The aim of our paper is to show how, using our algorithm, the contribution from point sources can be separated from the resulting signal on all scales. We believe that this technique is potentially a very powerful tool for extracting this type of noise from future high resolution maps.