text:
# Improved Measurement of the Angular Power Spectrum of Temperature Anisotropy in the CMB from Two New Analyses of Boomerang Observations

## 1 Introduction

Measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation now tightly constrain the nature and composition of our universe. High signal-to-noise detections of primordial anisotropies have been made at angular scales ranging from the quadrupole (Bennett et al., 1996) to as small as several arcminutes (Mason et al., 2002; Pearson et al., 2002; Dawson et al., 2002). The power spectrum of temperature fluctuations shows a peak at spherical harmonic multipole $`\mathrm{}200`$ which has been detected with very high signal-to-noise by several teams (de Bernardis et al., 2000; Hanany et al., 2000; Halverson et al., 2001; Scott et al., 2002), and strong indications of peaks at higher $`\mathrm{}`$ have also been found (Halverson et al., 2001; Netterfield et al., 2002; de Bernardis et al., 2002).

Within the context of models with adiabatic initial perturbations, as are generally predicted by inflation, these measurements have been used in combination with various other cosmological constraints to estimate the values of many important cosmological parameters. Combining their CMB data with weak cosmological constraints such as a very loose prior on the Hubble constant, various teams have made robust determinations of several parameters, including the total energy density of the universe $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{total}`$, the density of baryons $`\mathrm{\Omega }_b`$, and the value of the density perturbation power spectral index, $`n_s`$ (Lange et al., 2001; Balbi et al., 2000; Pryke et al., 2001; Netterfield et al., 2002). Many other parameters are tightly constrained when stronger constraints on cosmology are assumed.

We report here new results from the 1998 Antarctic flight of the Boomerang experiment. Previous results from this flight using less data than included here were published in de Bernardis et al. (2000) (hereafter B00) and Netterfield et al. (2002) (hereafter B02). Here we use the two very different analysis methods of B00 and B02, and apply them over a larger fraction of the dataset to make an improved measurement of the CMB angular power spectrum.

## 2 Instrument and Observations

Boomerang is a balloon-borne instrument, designed to measure the anisotropies of the CMB at sub-degree angular scales. The instrument consists of a bolometric mm-wave receiver mounted at the focus of an off-axis telescope, borne aloft on an altitude-azimuth pointed balloon gondola. Details of the instrument as it was configured for the 1998 Antarctic flight, and its performance during that flight, are given in Crill et al. (2002).

The receiver consists of 16 bolometers, optically coupled to the telescope through a variety of cryogenic filters, feedhorns, and reimaging optics. We report here results from four of the six 150 GHz detectors in the focal plane, the same four analyzed in B02. The other two 150 GHz detectors exhibited non-stationary noise properties and are not used in the analysis.

The telescope has a 1.2 m diameter primary mirror and two cryogenic reimaging mirrors mounted to the 2K surface of the receiver cryostat. These optics produce ($`9.2^{}`$,$`9.7^{}`$,$`9.4^{}`$,$`9.5^{}`$) FWHM beams at 150 GHz in the four channels used here. The measured beams are nearly symmetric Gaussians; the beamshapes are estimated by a physical optics calculation, and calibrated by measurements on the ground prior to flight. Uncertainty in the pointing solution ($`2.5^{}`$ rms) is estimated to smear the resolution of these physical beams to an effective resolution of ($`10.9^{}`$,$`11.4^{}`$,$`11.1^{}`$,$`11.2^{}`$) FWHM respectively. Based on the scatter of our various beam measures, and combined with our uncertainty in the smearing due to the pointing solution errors, we assign a 1-$`\sigma `$ uncertainty in the FWHM beamwidth of $`1.4^{}`$ in all channels. This introduces an uncertainty in the measured amplitude of the power spectrum that grows exponentially with $`\mathrm{}`$ and that is correlated between all bands. This effect reaches a maximum of $`\pm 40`$% in our highest bin ($`\mathrm{}=1000`$), and is illustrated in Figure 2 of B02.

The payload was launched from McMurdo Station, Antarctica on 29 December 1998 and circumnavigated the continent in 10.5 days at an approximately constant latitude of -78 degrees. During the flight, 247 hours of data were taken, most of them on a “CMB region” that was chosen for its very low dust contrast seen in the IRAS $`100\mu `$ maps of this region (Moshir et al., 1992).

The field observed in CMB scan mode is shown in Figure 1. We analyze a subset of this sky coverage here, chosen to be a contiguous region that is both sufficiently far from the galactic plane and well-covered by our observations. Figure 1 shows the boundary of the region that we analyze in this paper. This region covers 2.94% of the sky, and is defined as the intersection of:

* an ellipse centered on RA = $`88^{}`$, $`\delta =47^{}`$, with semiaxes $`a=25^{}`$ and $`b=19^{}`$, where the short axis lies along the local celestial meridian,
* the strip bounded by $`59^{}<\delta <29.5^{}`$,
* and the region with galactic latitude $`b<10^{}`$.

This contour includes the best observed area of the survey, while remaining far enough from the galactic disk to minimize galactic dust contamination. It also does not have any small scale features (such as sharp corners) that could induce excessive ringing in the power spectrum extracted using one of our two methods (FASTER) discussed below. This contour also excludes most of the scan turnarounds, where the scan speed is reduced and the low frequency noise can contaminate the angular scales of interest.

The vast majority of our observations of this region were made by fixing the elevation of the telescope and scanning azimuthally by $`\pm 30^{}`$, typically centered roughly $`30^{}`$ from the anti-solar azimuth. Also used were the “CMB region” portions of infrequently made ($`1`$ per hour) wider scans designed to traverse the Galactic plane as well.

CMB observations were made by scanning at three elevations ($`45^{}`$, $`50^{}`$ and $`55^{}`$), and at two azimuthal scan speeds (1 degree/second and 2 degrees/second, hereafter 1dps and 2dps respectively). The rising, setting and rotation of the sky observed from $`78^{}`$ latitude causes these fixed elevation scans to fill out the coverage of a two dimensional map. The color coding in our sky coverage map (Figure 1) gives the errors per pixel after coadding the data from the four 150 GHz detectors.

The raw detector timestreams are cleaned, filtered and calibrated before being fed to the mapping and power spectrum estimation pipelines described below. The cleaning and filtering used in this analysis is identical to that described in B02 and is also described in Crill et al. (2002); we give the most relevant details here.

Bolometers are sensitive to any input that changes the detector temperature, including cosmic ray interactions in the detector itself, radiofrequency interference (RFI), and thermal fluctuations of the baseplate heatsink temperature. After deconvolving the raw bolometer data with the filter response of the detector and associated electronics, RFI, cosmic rays, and thermal events are found by a variety of pattern-matching and map-based iterative techniques. Bad data are then flagged and replaced by a constrained realization of the noise so that nearby data can be used. In the four channels used here, approximately 4.8% is flagged. The tails of thermal events are fit to an exponential and corrected, and the data are used in the subsequent analysis. Finally, a very low frequency high-pass filter is applied in the Fourier domain, with a transfer function $`F(f)=0.5(1\mathrm{cos}(\pi f/0.01\text{Hz}))`$ for $`f0.01`$ Hz, $`F(f)=1`$ for $`f>0.01`$ Hz.

## 3 Data Analysis Methods

This paper reports our third analysis of data from the 1998 flight. In B00 we reported the angular power spectrum found by analyzing data from a single detector covering 1.0% of the sky, using roughly one detector-day of integration. In B02 we reported results from four 150 GHz detectors, using 17 detector-days of integration on 1.9% of the sky. Here we report new results using 50% more data from those same four detectors, using over 24 detector-days of integration on 2.9% of the celestial sphere.

The results reported here use the same timestream cleaning and pointing solutions described in B02. In addition to the larger sky cut, here we use two independent and very different analysis methods which derive the angular power spectrum of the CMB from those timestream inputs. One, using the MADCAP CMB analysis software suite (Borrill, 1999), creates a maximum likelihood map and pixel-pixel covariance matrix from the input detector timestreams and measured detector noise properties. The power spectrum is derived from the map and its covariance matrix; this was the method used in B00. The other method, based on the MASTER/FASTER algorithms described in Hivon et al. (2002) and Contaldi et al. (2002), relies on a spherical harmonic transform of a filtered, simply binned map created from those timestreams; the angular power spectrum in the filtered map is related to the full-sky unfiltered angular power spectrum through corrections derived from Monte-Carlos of the input detector timestream and model CMB sky signals. In the FASTER procedure, the best fit angular power spectrum is then obtained by using an iterative quadratic estimator analogous to that used in conventional maximum likelihood procedures. This method was used in B02.

A theme of this paper is the comparison of the results from these two very different analysis paths, and the stability of the cosmological results to any differences in the derived power spectra.

### 3.1 Detector noise estimation

Both MADCAP and FASTER require an accurate estimate of the detector noise properties in order to determine the angular power spectrum. We estimate these noise properties from the data themselves, using an iterative method to create an optimal, maximum likelihood map of the sky signal. We then remove this signal from the detector timestream prior to calculating the noise statistics. This method is described in both B02 and Prunet et al. (2001).

For bolometer $`i`$ and iteration $`j`$, $`𝐝_i,𝐀_i`$, $`𝐧_i^{(j)}`$, $`𝐍_i^{(j)}`$, and $`𝚫^{(j)}`$ are respectively the data, pointing matrix, noise timestream, noise timestream correlation matrix, and sky map. The sky map and noise timestream correlation matrices are found by iteration:

1. Given the data timestream and estimated map, solve for the noise-only timestream with $`𝐧_i^{(j)}=𝐝_i𝐀_i𝚫^{(j)}`$
2. Use $`𝐧_i^{(j)}`$ to construct the noise timestream correlation matrix, $`𝐍_i^{(j)}=𝐧_i^{(j)}𝐧_i^{(j)}`$
3. Solve for a new version of the map using $`𝚫^{(j+1)}=(\underset{i}{}𝐀_i^{}𝐍_i^{(j)1}𝐀_i)^1\underset{i}{}𝐀_i^{}𝐍_i^{(j)1}𝐝_i`$
4. Return to step 1, using the new version of the map, and repeat. Iterate until the map $`𝚫`$ and the noise correlation matrices $`𝐍_i`$ are stable.

For stationary noise $`𝐍_i`$ is diagonal in Fourier space, with the diagonal elements equal to the power spectrum of the noise. We also assume, and check in practice, that the noise correlation between channels is negligible.

The noise correlation matrix $`𝐍_i`$ is computed in Fourier space from the noise timestream $`𝐧_i`$ with a simple periodogram estimator. The maximum likelihood map of the combined bolometers, $`𝚫`$, is computed using a conjugate gradient approach (Doré et al., 2001), which improves the recovery of large scale modes in the map.

Solving for all channels in a combined way takes advantage of the redundant observations of the sky, therefore offering the best possible separation between signal and noise in the time streams for each bolometer. The noise power spectrum estimation is well-converged after a few iterations, typically three or four.

In this iterative procedure, we find a single maximum-likelihood map using all the data from all detectors. In practice a separate noise covariance is solved for in each of the 78 contiguous data “chunks”, bordered by elevations moves or other timestream disturbances. Thus, very slowly varying noise properties (eg a drift in the instrument noise) will not affect the analysis. Additionally, a line is evident in the noise power spectrum of the timestream data, varying slowly between 8 and 9 Hz over the course of the flight. We remove the effects of this non-stationary source of noise by removing information in the timestream between 8 and 9 Hz. These frequencies correspond to angular scales $`\mathrm{}>1000`$, outside the range that we report here, for all scan speeds.

### 3.2 The MADCAP Analysis Path

Given a pixel-pointed time-ordered dataset $`𝐝`$ with piecewise stationary Gaussian random noise, the maximum likelihood pixel map $`𝚫`$ and pixel-pixel noise correlation matrix $`𝐂_N`$ are (Wright, 1996; Tegmark, 1997; Ferreira & Jaffe, 2000)

$`𝚫`$ $`=`$ $`(𝐀^{}𝐍^1𝐀)^1𝐀^{}𝐍^1𝐝`$
$`𝐂_N`$ $`=`$ $`(𝐀^{}𝐍^1𝐀)^1`$ (1)
where, as before, $`𝐀`$ is the pointing matrix and $`𝐍`$ is the block-Toeplitz time-time noise correlation matrix.

Assuming that the CMB signal is Gaussian and azimuthally symmetric, the maximum likelihood angular power spectrum $`C_l`$ is that which maximizes the log-likelihood of the derived map given that spectrum (Gorski, 1994; Bond et al., 1998),

$$(𝐝|C_{\mathrm{}})=\frac{1}{2}\left(𝐝^{}𝐂^1𝐝\mathrm{Tr}\left[\mathrm{ln}𝐂\right]\right),$$
(2)
where $`𝐂`$ is the full pixel-pixel covariance matrix. The CMB signal and the detector noise are uncorrelated, so $`𝐂`$ is just the sum of the $`𝐂_N`$ found above, and the theory pixel-pixel covariance matrix $`𝐂_T`$ derived for a particular set of $`C_{\mathrm{}}`$’s.

In the MADCAP analysis path (Borrill, 1999) we solve these equations exactly, calculating the closed form solution for the map, using quasi Newton-Raphson iteration to find the set of $`C_{\mathrm{}}`$’s that maximizes the log-likelihood (Bond et al., 1998). Because the pixel-pixel correlation matrices are dense, the operation count scales as the cube, and the memory requirement as the square, of the number of pixels in the map. This imposes serious practical constraints on the size of the problems we can tackle; by optimizing our algorithms to minimize the scaling prefactors, and using massively parallel computers, we have been able to solve systems with up to O($`10^5`$) pixels - sufficient to analyze this dataset at $`7^{}`$ pixelization.

There are two analyses that we want to perform on this dataset, each of which involve both map-making and power-spectrum estimation. First, we want to analyze the full dataset including all four channels at both scan speeds, to solve for the CMB angular power spectrum. Second, we want to perform a systematic test of the self-consistency of the data, differencing two halves of the data and checking that the sky signal disappears.

For the first of these, we construct a time-ordered dataset by concatenating the data from all four channels at both scan speeds, and solve for the map using the eight associated time-time noise correlation functions. This timestream consists of 163,726,965 observations of 160,805 pixels. Using 400 processors on NERSC’s 3000-processor IBM SP3, the associated map and pixel-pixel noise correlation matrix can be calculated from equation 1 in about 4 hours. Pixels not included in the cut being analyzed here are removed from the map, and the corresponding rows and columns of the pixel-pixel noise correlation matrix are excised, equivalent to marginalizing over them. The resulting map contains 92251 pixels, and the associated noise correlation matrix fills 70 Gb of memory at 8-byte precision.

For the second analysis, we construct two time-ordered datasets, each containing the data from all four channels but at only one of the two scan speeds. The 2dps time-ordered data contains 74,879,196 observations over 124,257 pixels, while at 1dps we have 88,832,768 observations over 151,654 pixels. Having made the maps and pixel-pixel noise correlation matrices from each timestream we apply our cut as above, and in addition remove any pixels within the cut that are not observed in both halves of the flight. This results in two maps ($`𝚫_𝐀`$ and $`𝚫_𝐁`$) and their associated noise correlation matrices each covering an identical subset of 88,407 pixels. We then extract the power spectrum of the map $`𝚫_J=(𝚫_A𝚫_B)/2`$, taking the noise correlation matrix of $`𝚫_J`$ to be the appropriately weighted sum of those for the component maps, $`𝐂_N^J=(𝐂_N^A+𝐂_N^B)/4`$. This assumes the 2dps and 1dps noise are uncorrelated. In the power spectrum estimation process we assume a CMB-like theory correlation matrix when calculating the $`C_{\mathrm{}}`$’s.

The finite extent of our maps creates finite correlation between our estimates of the power in nearby multipoles. However, we can reduce these correlations to small levels by calculating the power in tophat bins of sufficient width. We choose bins of width $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{}=50`$, centered on $`\mathrm{}=50,100,150,\mathrm{}1000`$, together with additional “junk” bins below $`\mathrm{}=25`$ and above $`\mathrm{}=1025`$, which are included to prevent very low-$`\mathrm{}`$ and very high-$`\mathrm{}`$ power from being aliased into the range of interest. This binning reduces the correlations between adjacent bins to to less than $`13`$% between neighboring bands.

The power in a multipole bin is related to the power in the individual multipoles in that bin through a shape function: $`C_{\mathrm{}}=C_bC_{\mathrm{}}^{shape}`$. Although we are free to choose any spectral shape within each bin, experience shows that for relatively narrow bins the particular choice makes very little difference. We can explicitly account for the assumed spectral shape in our cosmological parameter extraction; here we use a flat shape function such that $`\mathrm{}(\mathrm{}+1)C_{\mathrm{}}^{shape}=\mathrm{constant}`$.

The maps derived from the time-ordered data have been smoothed by both the detector beams and the common pixelization. For constant, circularly symmetric beams and pixels we can account for this exactly by incorporating the appropriate multipole window function in the pixel-pixel signal correlation matrix, $`𝐂_T`$.

The fact that each detector has a different beam means that ideally we should construct individual maps and noise correlation matrices for each channel and solve for the maximum likelihood power spectrum of all four maps (each convolved with its own beam) simultaneously. However, this would give a 4-fold increase in the number of pixels, and a 64-fold increase in the compute time. Instead, we analyze the single all-channel map assuming a noise-weighted average beam; this approximation is quantitatively justified by tests done with the FASTER pipeline, below.

We use the HEALPIX pixelization (Górski et al., 1998); in this scheme, the pixels have equal area but are asymmetric and have varying shapes. These slightly different shapes lead to pixel-specific window functions. Calculating all of the individual pixel window functions at our resolution is not feasible; instead, we use the all-sky average HEALPIX window function appropriate for our resolution.

By comparing individual pixel window functions at lower resolution, we can set an upper limit on the errors that may be induced by this approximation. Scaling to $`27^{}`$ pixels (a factor of 4 larger) we find maximum deviations of 5% in temperature (ie, 10% in power) in the ratio of actual pixel window functions to the average pixel window function on the whole celestial sphere, at the correspondingly scaled $`\mathrm{}`$ of 1024/4 = 256. Thus, the pixel window function employed cannot be more than 5% (corresponding to an error in $`C_{\mathrm{}}`$ of 10%) off the true value at our highest $`\mathrm{}`$. In fact, since the field incorporates pixels of many geometries, averaging will make the error much smaller, realistically less than 1% in temperature.

Thus far we have assumed that the time-ordered data is comprised of CMB signal and stationary Gaussian noise only. However, we know that in our data there are systematics that lead to residual constant-declination stripes in the map. Failure to account for these residuals leads to the detection of a signal in the (1dps-2dps)/2 difference maps, which should be pure noise maps. In the MADCAP approach we account for these residuals by marginalizing over the contaminated modes when deriving the power spectrum from the map (Borrill et al., 2002). Specifically, to give zero weight to a particular pixel-template we add infinite noise in that mode to the pixel-pixel correlation matrix

$$𝐂^1lim_\sigma \mathrm{}\left(𝐂+\sigma ^2𝐌^{}𝐌\right)^1$$
(3)
where $`𝐌`$ is the matrix of orthogonal templates, one of each mode to be marginalized over. Applying the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury formula this reduces to

$$𝐂^1𝐂^1𝐂^1𝐌\left(𝐌^{}𝐂^1𝐌\right)^1𝐌^{}𝐂^1,$$
(4)
yielding a readily calculable correction - requiring computationally inexpensive matrix-vector operations only – to the inverse correlation matrix. Now whenever we multiply by $`𝐂^1`$ in estimating the power spectrum we simply add the appropriate correction term. For the residual constant-declination stripes in this dataset we construct a sine and cosine template along each line of pixels of constant declination for all modes with wavelengths longer than 32 pixels (about 4 degrees).

Once the iterative power spectrum estimation has converged, the error bars on each bin are estimated from the initial (zero signal) and final bin-bin Fisher information matrices using the offset lognormal approximation (Bond et al., 1998).

### 3.3 The FASTER Analysis Path

The FASTER pipeline is based on the MASTER technique described in Hivon et al. (2002). MASTER allows fast and accurate determination of $`C_{\mathrm{}}`$ without performing the time consuming matrix-matrix manipulations that characterize exact methods such as MADCAP (Borrill, 1999).

As in MADCAP, there are two separate steps in the FASTER path; mapmaking, and power spectrum estimation from that map. In our current implementation of FASTER, we make a map from the data by naively binning the timestream into pixels on the sky. To reduce the effects of $`1/f`$ noise on this naively binned map, a brick-wall highpass Fourier filter is first applied to the timestream at a frequency of 0.1 Hz for the 1dps data, and 0.2 Hz for the 2dps data.

The spherical harmonic transform of this naively binned map is calculated using a fast $`𝒪(N_{pix}^{1/2}\mathrm{})`$ method based on the Healpix tessellation of the sphere (Górski et al., 1998). The angular power in a noisy map, $`\stackrel{~}{C_{\mathrm{}}}`$, can be related to the true angular power spectrum on the full sky, $`C_{\mathrm{}}`$, by the effect of finite sky coverage ($`M_{\mathrm{}\mathrm{}^{}}`$), time and spatial filtering of the maps ($`F_{\mathrm{}}`$), the finite beam size of the instrument ($`B_{\mathrm{}}`$), and instrument noise ($`N_{\mathrm{}}`$) as

$$\stackrel{~}{C_{\mathrm{}}}=\underset{\mathrm{}^{}}{}M_{\mathrm{}\mathrm{}^{}}F_{\mathrm{}^{}}B_{\mathrm{}^{}}^2C_{\mathrm{}^{}}+\stackrel{~}{N_{\mathrm{}}}.$$
(5)
The coupling matrix $`M_{\mathrm{}\mathrm{}^{}}`$ is computed analytically. $`B_{\mathrm{}}`$ is determined by the measured beam and the pixel window function assuming here that the pixel has a circular symmetry. $`F_{\mathrm{}}`$ is determined from Monte-Carlo simulations of signal-only time streams, and $`N_{\mathrm{}}`$ from noise-only simulations of the time streams.

The simulated time streams are created using the actual flight pointing and transient flagging. The signal component of these time streams is generated from simulated CMB maps, while the noise component is from realizations of the measured detector noise $`n(f)`$. In both cases the same high pass filtering (0.1 Hz at 1dps and 0.2 Hz at 2dps) and notch filtering (between 8 and 9 Hz, to eliminate the previously mentioned non-stationary spectral line in the timestream data) is applied to the simulated TOD as to the real one. $`F_{\mathrm{}}`$ and $`N_{\mathrm{}}`$ are determined by averaging over 600 and 750 realizations respectively. Once all of these components are known the power spectrum estimation is carried out as follows.

A suitable quadratic estimator of the full sky spectrum in the cut sky variables $`\stackrel{~}{C}_{\mathrm{}}`$ together with its Fisher matrix is constructed via the coupling matrix $`M_{\mathrm{}\mathrm{}^{}}`$ and the transfer function $`F_{\mathrm{}}`$ (Bond et al., 1998; Netterfield et al., 2002). The underlying power is recovered through the iterative convergence of the quadratic estimator onto the maximum likelihood value as in standard maximum likelihood techniques. A great simplification and speed-up is obtained due to the diagonality of all the quantities involved, effectively avoiding the $`𝒪(N^3)`$ large matrix inversion problem of the general maximum likelihood method. The extension of the quadratic estimator formalism to Monte-Carlo techniques such as MASTER have the added advantage that the Fisher matrix characterizing the uncertainty in the estimator is recovered directly in the iterative solution and does not rely on any potentially biased signal+noise simulation ensembles. A detailed discussion of the FASTER extension to the MASTER procedure can be found in Contaldi et al. (2002).

A drawback of using naively binned maps in the pipeline is that the aggressive time filtering completely suppresses the power in the maps below a critical scale $`\mathrm{}_c50`$ (Hivon et al., 2002). This results in one or more bands in the power spectrum running over modes with no power and which are thus unconstrainable. In practice we deal with this by binning the power so that many of the degenerate modes lie within the first band $`2<\mathrm{}25`$. The power in the degenerate band can then be regularized to zero power or a level consistent with the DMR large scale results. Regularizing with a non-zero value carries the disadvantage that the second band $`25<\mathrm{}75`$ will be non-trivially correlated with power which carries a theoretical bias. Regularizing with zero power results in no correlations between the first two bands and is more consistent with the filtering done on the Monte-Carlo maps which sets the signal in the affected modes to zero identically below $`\mathrm{}_c`$. We adopt the latter approach in this analysis to recover a useful band which we label as $`25<\mathrm{}75`$. However, as the window functions will show below (Figure 12), most of the information in this band comes from $`50<\mathrm{}75`$.

The FASTER pipeline allows the use of non-uniform masks applied to the observed patch of sky. We have experimented with a number of such weighting schemes for our patch including total variance weighting $`1/(S+N)`$ and Weiner-like $`S/(S+N)`$ weighting where $`S`$ is the Monte-Carlo estimated variance of the coadded signal in the pixel (which varies from pixel to pixel because of the high pass filtering applied to the time data stream and the non-uniform scanning speed) and $`N`$ is the variance of the noise in the pixel. We have found the $`1/(S+N)`$ weighting gives optimal results for this particular patch and coverage scheme of this analysis.

In order to remove any effect of the constant-declination striping contaminant described above a further (spatial) filtering step is applied to all the maps in the pipeline. The HEALPIX map is projected to a rectangular, square-pixel map, where a spatial Fourier filter is applied that removes all modes in the map with wavelengths greater than 8.2 degrees in the RA direction. This filtered map is then projected back to the HEALPIX pixelization.

The inclusion of several channels is achieved by averaging the maps (both from the data, and from the Monte-Carlos of each channel) before power spectrum estimation. Weighting in the addition is by hits per pixel, and by receiver noise at 1Hz. Each channel has a slightly different beam size, which is taken into account in the generation of the simulated maps. The Monte-Carlo procedure employed in FASTER and MASTER ensures that the estimated power is explicitly unbiased with respect to any known systematics, thus any inaccuracy in assuming a common $`B_{\mathrm{}}`$ in the angular power spectrum estimation is then absorbed into $`F_{\mathrm{}}`$. Similarly, any inaccuracy on the effective pixel window function for the patch of sky under consideration would be absorbed into $`F_{\mathrm{}}`$.

The calculation of the full angular power spectrum and covariance matrix for the four good 150 GHz channels of Boomerang ($`350,000`$ $`3.5^{}`$ pixels and $`216,000,000`$ time samples; this is different from the MADCAP numbers given above because non-CMB sections of the timestream are treated differently) takes approximately four hours running on six nodes of the NERSC IBM SP3.

### 3.4 Application to Data

When treating real data, each of the methods described has particular advantages. MADCAP is an “optimal” tool, in the sense that it uses the full statistical power of the data in deriving the power spectrum; no other method can use the same data and produce a power spectrum with smaller errorbars. In addition, it produces a maximum-likelihood map and pixel-pixel covariance matrix that take advantage of the full cross-linking of the scan strategy. However, the MADCAP algorithms are computationally very costly. This leads to the use of several approximations (eg the use of a single beam for the four channels, using an average pixel window function, and fitting errors as a lognormal function), and reduces our ability to use this method for wide-ranging testing of potential systematic effects. With our current computing power and sky cut, we are limited to a $`7^{}`$ pixelization with MADCAP.

The FASTER method provides a less-optimal estimate of the power spectrum, but is computationally much more rapid. As will be shown below, in our case the FASTER results are nearly as statistically powerful as those from MADCAP. The rapid computational turnaround allows the use of finer pixelization ($`3.5^{}`$), and extensive systematic testing and modeling of potential systematic errors. Additionally, FASTER is capable of handling independent beams, and enables the computation of a true window function for our $`\mathrm{}`$ bins for use in parameter extraction.

## 4 Signal maps

The first step in each pipeline is the production of a sky map. The fundamental differences between the two analysis paths are well illustrated by a visual comparison of the two maps, shown in Figure 2. Though there is a high correlation of the small-scale structure in these two maps, their overall appearance is strikingly different, due primarily to the time-domain filtering that suppresses large scale structure in the FASTER map. In addition, the FASTER map has had the constant declination modes removed (hereafter, “destriped”), while the MADCAP map has not. (The MADCAP destriping occurs via marginalization over contaminated modes during the power spectrum estimation). The MADCAP map should be interpreted in concert with its covariance matrix, which describes which modes in the map are well constrained and which are not. The FASTER procedure does not create a covariance matrix; the correlations in the map are accounted for in the Monte-Carlo process. Thus while it is reassuring that the two maps show similar structure on small scales, a quantitative comparison can only be made by proceeding through the estimation of the angular power spectrum with each method.

## 5 FASTER Analysis consistency tests

The MADCAP analysis is limited to $`7^{}`$ pixelization, and assumes a common beam window function for the four channels. We have used the FASTER pipeline to check the effect of this coarser pixelization and window function assumption with respect to the baseline FASTER result, which is calculated using $`3.5^{}`$ pixels and individual window functions for each channel. The baseline FASTER result is shown in Figure 3, which also gives results derived using $`7^{}`$ pixels, and results derived using the same “single beam” assumption used by MADCAP. As can be seen in the figure, the single beam approximation has negligible effect. The $`7^{}`$ pixelization does have some effect, but it is small compared with the statistical errors.

We have also tested the robustness of the FASTER result to other changes in the pipeline. Figure 3 also shows the effects of destriping, and of using signal+noise weighting (rather than uniform weighting). These have some affect on the power spectrum, again smaller than the statistical errors. Note that we expect these to have some effect given that the information content of the map is modified by these procedures.

Another test of the robustness of the angular power spectrum is to change the details of the $`\mathrm{}`$ binning. We have used the FASTER pipeline to derive power spectra with $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{}=40`$ bins, and for $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{}=50`$ bins shifted by 25 from our fiducial binning. Both of these give excellent agreement with power spectrum of Figure 3.

## 6 Internal Consistency Tests

The analysis pipelines described above deliver an estimated CMB power spectrum along with statistical errors on that power spectrum. Below, we will show the CMB power spectra derived from the maps, and use those results to estimate cosmological parameters. Before doing so, we describe here a variety of internal consistency tests designed to check for residual systematic contamination.

Our internal consistency checks are done by splitting the dataset roughly in half, making a map with each half of the data, subtracting these two maps, and asking whether the power spectrum of the residual map is consistent with pure detector noise. Note that one only expects the two maps to be identical if they contain the same information; if the two maps have been observed or filtered differently, perfect agreement is not expected.

Our most powerful internal consistency check is to take data that was gathered while scanning the gondola azimuthally at 1dps (roughly the first half of the flight) and compare it with data taken during 2dps scans (roughly the second half of the flight). This tests for effects that vary over long timescales, position of the gondola over the Earth, position of the scan region with respect to the Sun, and instrumental effects that are modulated by scan speed. The latter include any mis-estimate of the transfer function of the detector system and any non-stationary noise in the detector system. Hereafter, this test is referred to as the (1dps-2dps)/2 consistency test. Each pipeline was used to produce and estimate the power spectrum of a (1dps-2dps)/2 map.

Figure 4 shows MADCAP and FASTER (1dps-2dps) difference maps, each pixelized at $`7^{}`$. Many of the gross features apparent in both maps are due to the variations in S/N, as can be seen by comparison with Figure 1. The MADCAP map is not destriped, because the destriping in that pipeline is done with a constraint matrix in deriving the power spectrum. The FASTER map is destriped; and appears significantly cleaner to the eye. In practice, a $`3.5^{}`$ pixelized map is used in the FASTER analysis; here we display a $`7^{}`$ map so the noise level per pixel remains comparable to the MADCAP version.

Figure 5 shows the power spectra of the signal maps (top panel) shown in Figure 2 and of the (1dps-2dps) difference maps (bottom panel) shown in Figure 4. It is apparent that the power spectra of the signal maps are in very good agreement with one another; these are discussed in more detail below. Here we focus on the (1dps-2dps)/2 difference spectra.

The statistical error in the power spectra of the signal maps is dominated by sample variance for $`\mathrm{}<500`$. Because there is no signal and thus no sample variance in the power spectra of the difference maps, the difference maps are sensitive to systematic effects that are well below the (sample variance dominated) statistical noise of the signal maps at low $`\mathrm{}`$.

The FASTER Monte-Carlo simulations show that the different scanning and $`\mathrm{}`$-space filtering in the 1dps and 2dps data leads to a leakage of CMB signal into the (1dps-2dps)/2 FASTER map. The average level of this signal is expected to be at the level of $`10\mu \text{K}^2`$ near the first peak at $`\mathrm{}200`$. We correct for this effect in the FASTER pipeline consistency test by subtracting the Monte-Carlo mean residual power found in each bin from the actual (1dps-2dps)/2 power spectrum, and by adding the variance of this effect in quadrature to the errors on that power spectrum.

After these corrections to the FASTER pipeline, we find the difference map angular power spectra shown in the bottom panel of Figure 5. The $`\chi ^2`$ per degree of freedom with respect to a zero-signal model is 1.34 (1.28) with a probability of exceeding this $`\chi ^2`$ of $`P_>=0.14`$ (0.18) for the MADCAP (FASTER) analysis, respectively. Thus, when the entire spectrum is considered, the difference spectra of both analysis methods are reasonably consistent with zero. It is clearly apparent, however, that there is a statistically significant signal in the FASTER difference spectrum, at $`\mathrm{}300`$. Over this limited range of the spectrum, the FASTER spectrum has a reduced $`\chi ^2=3.7`$ for 6 degrees of freedom, for a $`P_>=0.001`$. Over the same range, the MADCAP analysis gives a reduced $`\chi ^2=1.10`$ for 6 degrees of freedom, for a $`P_>=0.36`$.

The residual signal in the FASTER difference map is both localized in $`\mathrm{}`$ and very small, with a mean of only $`45\mu \text{K}^2`$ in the four bins $`150<\mathrm{}<300`$. The CMB signal is roughly 5000 $`\mu \text{K}^2`$ in this $`\mathrm{}`$ range, and our statistical errors on the CMB signal, dominated by sample variance, are $`400\mu \text{K}^2`$. Thus, though the FASTER pipeline formally fails this test, our statistical errors dominate our systematic errors by an order of magnitude.

Investigation of individual detector channels shows that the (1dps-2dps)/2 power spectra near $`\mathrm{}200`$ are of similar shape and amplitude in each. We have done a variety of other consistency tests and simulations using the FASTER pipeline on our lowest-noise channel, B150A, to try and understand potential sources for the (1dps-2dps)/2 failure. We have broken the data into four quarters (Q1 and Q2 at 1dps; Q3 and Q4 at 2dps) and found difference map power spectra for combinations that minimize effects that depend on scan speed \[(Q1+Q3)-(Q2+Q4)\] or a drift in time \[(Q1+Q4)-(Q2+Q3)\]. These combinations fail the consistency test with amplitudes and shapes similar to the (1dps-2dps)/2 failure.

Simulations were done in an attempt to recreate the (1dps-2dps)/2 difference failure by inducing various systematic effects. Changes in the gain, the pointing offset, and the filtering were modeled. Of these, only the last can explain the failure in the FASTER pipeline, given that the data pass the test in the MADCAP pipeline, since gain and pointing offsets should be treated identically by the two methods. For plausible levels of these systematic errors, none induced (1dps-2dps)/2 failures at the level seen. The systematic that created the most similar shape was a pointing offset between the two data sets. This is not a priori unlikely, as it is plausible that a differential offset might occur in the attitude reconstruction for the two scan speeds. The magnitude of the difference test failure would correspond to an $`7^{}`$ offset between the two data sets. This is inconsistent with the measured stability of the positions of the quasars in the two maps and, more importantly, is inconsistent with the fact that the MADCAP analysis achieves equally high or higher sensitivity and passes this test. We have not been able to find the cause of the FASTER analysis failure of the (1dps-2dps)/2 consistency test.

We also used the FASTER pipeline to perform two other consistency tests on the real data. These are shown, along with the (1dps-2dps)/2 results for reference, in Figure 6. One differences maps made using rightgoing vs. leftgoing scans. Another compares maps made with two of the four channels (channels A and A2) with the other two (channels A1 and B2). Both of these power spectra appear to be consistent with zero in all $`\mathrm{}`$ regions, as evidenced by the statistics quoted in Table 1.

The (1dps-2dps)/2 test failure on the FASTER pipeline leads us to the inclusion of an additional systematic error term in the region where that failure is significant, ie for $`\mathrm{}400`$. In our final results below, we increase the quoted FASTER errors on those bins by the amount of the failure, adding it in quadrature (in $`\mu \text{K}^2`$) to the likelihood derived errors. In the Fisher matrix this corresponds to adding the difference map power spectrum residuals in quadrature to the diagonal elements, while leaving the off-diagonal terms unmodified.

## 7 Comparison of results

The discussion above leads us to believe that the larger pixels and the single-beam approximation used by MADCAP should not have a significant effect on the power spectrum. In addition, we have learned of a small consistency test failure over a small range of $`\mathrm{}`$ in the FASTER power spectrum, and corrected the errors on the spectrum accordingly.

We now turn to the comparison of the CMB power spectra derived with FASTER and MADCAP, shown in the top panel of Figure 5.

Despite the fact that they were derived from the same timestream data, there are several reasons why these two power spectra are not expected to be identical. Both the crosslinked observing strategy and the lower frequency filtering cutoff in the timestream allows MADCAP to recover some modes that are missing from the FASTER map.

At the level of the errors shown, the agreement between these two estimates of the power spectrum is excellent. However, there is some indication of a systematic “tilt” between the two spectra. The level of this tilt is not large; modeling it as a difference in the beam window functions, reducing the FWHM of the beam used by MADCAP by one quarter of our systematic beam uncertainty, visually removes the apparent tilt. For this reason, and as is borne out by the discussion below, this difference will not have much effect on the cosmological parameter estimation results.

However, we have investigated any known differences that could lead to a systematic difference between these two power estimation methods. We have shown (via the FASTER consistency tests discussed above) that the larger pixelization and single-beam assumption of MADCAP should not produce such a tilt. Another potential effect is a bias in the pixel window function, which MADCAP takes to be the average HEALPIX window function on the sphere. The FASTER Monte-Carlos incorporate the effects of the real pixel geometries; any bias induced by using a single, isotropized approximation for the smoothing of the HEALPIX pixelization is corrected by Monte-Carlo estimation of the transfer function $`F_{\mathrm{}}`$. In effect the transfer function ensures the method is robust to any similar approximations used in describing the effective pixelization smoothing. However, the analytic arguments discussed above, based on individual pixel window functions calculated for larger pixels, indicate that any such bias caused by the MADCAP assumption should be very small.

Another potential bias could be introduced by the destriping algorithms. We have used Monte-Carlos to test for such effects in FASTER, and have found that any such bias is much smaller than the effect seen here. The marginalization method used by MADCAP is not expected to bias the power spectrum in any way, but Monte-Carlo tests to verify this are not practical given the greater computational cost of that pipeline.

In principle a tilt could also be induced by a difference in the timestream noise statistics used by one of the methods; however, the same noise power spectrum (or time-time noise correlation function) is used by the two pipelines.

It is possible that the constant declination striping is not fully removed by one of the destriping algorithms, and this leads to the difference in tilt. As can be seen in Figure 3, the FASTER destriping does affect the power spectrum slightly at high $`\mathrm{}`$. If this is the reason for the tilt discrepancy, residual striping that is randomly phased with respect to the CMB sky signal would increase the level of the power spectrum.

Figure 7 compares the B02 result, derived using FASTER on 1.9% of the sky at $`7^{}`$ pixelization, with several new results. The top panel compares the B02 result with the final FASTER result discussed above, on 2.9% of the sky at $`3.5^{}`$ resolution. The middle panel shows a new MADCAP analysis of the same region as B02, with the same resolution. Finally, in the bottom panel B02 is compared with the MADCAP analysis of the larger cut analyzed in this paper, at $`7^{}`$ resolution. As expected, the larger dataset leads to smaller errorbars across the entire range of $`\mathrm{}`$. The MADCAP errors are smaller than the FASTER errors at low $`\mathrm{}`$, due to the preservation of lower frequencies in the timestream. The FASTER results agree very well with one another, except in the region near $`\mathrm{}800`$ where there are three 1-$`\sigma `$ and one 2-$`\sigma `$ deviations. In the lower panels there is some evidence for the same tilt bias between MADCAP and FASTER on the B02 cut (mentioned above), indicating this is not unique to the larger sky cut.

## 8 Galactic Dust

In Masi et al. (2001) we measured the angular power spectrum of the Boomerang 410 GHz map in three circles of $`9^{}`$ radius, centered at galactic latitudes of $`b=38^{}`$, $`27^{}`$ and $`17^{}`$. Correlating the lower-frequency Boomerang maps, which are dominated by CMB fluctuations, with the 3000 GHz map of Finkbeiner et al. (1999, model 8 of that paper), gave a measure of the spectral ratios between that map and the Boomerang bands; these ratios were used to scale the 410 GHz power spectra to the lower frequencies.

In the region farthest from the galactic plane, the 410 GHz map is consistent with noise and no dust power spectrum result is reported. Figure 8 shows the extracted power spectrum of dust for the $`b=27^{}`$ circle, taken directly from Masi et al. (2001), along with the same calculation for the $`b=17^{}`$ circle of that paper. These results show that the dust contribution to the total power spectrum is largest at low $`\mathrm{}`$, and is generally small ($`<100\mu `$K<sup>2</sup>).

A proper estimate of the contribution of dust emission to the measured power spectrum requires the specific morphology of the dust emission be taken into account. We have done this by using the MADCAP analysis path to marginalize over templates of the galactic foregrounds. The results are shown in Figure 9. Here, we have used two templates, one of galactic synchrotron emission (Haslam et al., 1981; Jonas et al., 1998; Finkbeiner, 2002), the other of galactic dust emission (Schlegel et al., 1998; Finkbeiner, 2002). The power spectrum is very stable to this process, with no significant change for $`\mathrm{}100`$. There is a one sigma change in the power at $`\mathrm{}=50`$, consistent with the the expectation that the effects of dust contamination should be largest at lowest $`\mathrm{}`$, and generally small. We use the galaxy template marginalized MADCAP results in the remainder of this paper. For the FASTER results, for which the statistical errors at low $`\mathrm{}`$ are substantially higher than those of the MADCAP spectrum, the effects of dust emission are negligible.

## 9 Final Results

We have used FASTER and MADCAP to derive two estimates of the angular power spectrum using the same input timestream, sky coverage, and noise statistics. The final FASTER results, derived from a $`3.5^{}`$ pixel map and corrected for the small (1dps-2dps)/2 consistency test failure, appear along with the final galaxy-marginalized MADCAP results in Figure 10.

Our power spectrum results are characterized by a likelihood function for the bandpower in each band ($`𝒞_b`$). A good approximation to this function is given by an offset lognormal function (Bond et al., 1998) $`Z_b=\mathrm{ln}(\overline{𝒞}_b+x_b)`$ of the maximum likelihood values found in each band ($`\overline{𝒞}_b`$) and an offset parameter for each band, $`x_b`$. Given these, the likelihood is found by

$`\sigma _b`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{\Delta }\overline{𝒞}_b/(\overline{𝒞}_b+x_b)`$ (6)
$`\mathrm{\Delta }Z_b`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{ln}(𝒞_b+x_b)\mathrm{ln}(\overline{𝒞}_b+x_b)`$ (7)
$`2\mathrm{ln}L(𝒞_b)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{bb^{}}{}}\mathrm{\Delta }Z_b\sigma _b^1G_{bb^{}}\sigma _b^{}^1\mathrm{\Delta }Z_b^{}`$ (8)
where $`G_{bb^{}}`$ is the bandpower correlation matrix, normalized to unity on the diagonal. Table 2 gives the maximum likelihood value $`\overline{𝒞}_b=\mathrm{}(\mathrm{}+1)C_{\mathrm{}}/2\pi `$, curvature error ($`\mathrm{\Delta }\overline{𝒞}_b`$), and offset parameter $`x_b`$ for each band for both the FASTER and MADCAP results of Figure 10. The bin-bin correlation matrices for these power spectra are given in Tables 3 and 4 for FASTER and MADCAP respectively. These data, and the window functions of Figure 12, are available at http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/boomerang/ or http://oberon.roma1.infn.it/boomerang.

One measure of the level of agreement between the FASTER and MADCAP power spectra can be made by treating the two power spectra as independent datasets (which they are not) and using the curvature errorbars to calculate a chi-square statistic. We find that $`\chi ^2=8.54`$ for 20 degrees of freedom, which gives $`P_>=0.988`$. This low $`\chi ^2`$ value indicates that the two analyses of the same data vary by an amount much less than is expected for two random realizations of the same measurement. That is, the “analysis variance” is very small compared to the statistical errors.

## 10 Features in the Power Spectrum

The cosmological parameter estimation procedure we follow below is done in the context of inflation-motivated models with adiabatic initial density perturbations. Thus, it is both interesting and important to assess the evidence in favor of these models. One of their generic predictions is that there will be a series of peaks in the CMB power spectrum, the exact positions and amplitudes of which depend on the cosmological parameters. It is thus interesting to search for such features in our power spectrum and evaluate the statistical significance with which they are detected.

To detect such features, we use the method applied to the B02 power spectrum in de Bernardis et al. (2002), based on parabolic fits to the CMB power spectrum over a fixed number of bands. We fit the spectrum to the polynomial

$$𝒞_{\mathrm{}}=𝒞_A(\mathrm{}\mathrm{}_p)^2+𝒞_B,$$
(9)
where $`\mathrm{}_p`$ is the peak position. In order to fit the measured bandpowers $`\overline{𝒞}_b`$ we average the model $`𝒞_{\mathrm{}}`$ over the bands reported in Table 2, thus obtaining the theoretical bandpowers $`𝒞_b^T`$. Using the covariance matrix $`G_{bb^{^{}}}^1`$ of the measured bandpowers we compute

$$\chi ^2=(\overline{𝒞}_b𝒞_b^T)G_{bb^{}}^1(\overline{𝒞}_b^{}𝒞_b^{}^T),$$
(10)
which we minimize by varying $`𝒞_A`$, $`𝒞_B`$ and $`\mathrm{}_p`$. Errors on the fit $`\mathrm{}_p`$ and $`𝒞_B`$ are found by marginalization of the full likelihood over $`𝒞_A`$. In order to evaluate the significance of the detection of a feature we study the likelihood of the curvature $`𝒞_A`$ marginalizing over the other two parameters.

When we compare different models, i.e. different values of the two parameters $`\mathrm{}_p`$ and $`𝒞_B`$, the $`\chi ^2`$ has 2 degrees of freedom. In order to show how other models compare to the best-fit one, we plot in Figure 11 the contours corresponding to $`\mathrm{\Delta }\chi ^2=2.3,6.17,11.8`$, i.e. $`68.3\%,95.4\%`$ and $`99.7\%`$ confidence.

Table 5 shows the results of this analysis for both the MADCAP and the FASTER power spectra of Table 2. The significance of the detections depends somewhat on the range of bands over which the fit is done; the results in the table are those that give the most significant detections. Comparing the results to de Bernardis et al. (2002) we find a general improvement in the precision with which the peaks and valleys are located, particularly for the first and second peaks, and for the first valley. We obtain very similar results in a variation of this method where a three-parameter quadratic is fit over a sliding five-band window, also described in de Bernardis et al. (2002). The results are also very similar when applied to a FASTER power spectrum derived for bands of the same width ($`\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{}=50`$) with band centers shifted by $`\mathrm{}=25`$.

In order to investigate the level at which the detections of different peaks are correlated, we have performed a simultaneous fit of all the spectral bins using a linear combination of four Gaussians

$$𝒞_{\mathrm{}}=\underset{i=1}{\overset{4}{}}A_i^2\mathrm{exp}((\mathrm{}\mathrm{}_i)^2/2\sigma _i^2),$$
(11)
which is sufficiently flexible to provide a good fit to any standard theoretical spectrum. We proceed using a Monte-Carlo Markov Chain method, as in Christensen et al. (2001), Lewis & Bridle (2002), and Odman et al. (2002), accounting for calibration and beam uncertainties as in Bridle et al. (2002). We find best fit values for $`A_i`$ and $`\mathrm{}_i`$ that are in good agreement with the results obtained above, and point clearly towards the presence of features in the power spectrum.

Using this simultaneous fit to all of the power spectrum bins with a single phenomenological function allows us to study the correlation between the different parameters. These are not negligible between the amplitudes of the peaks that are near to each other (for example $`R(A_1,A_2)=0.19`$; $`R(A_1,A_3)=0.07`$, $`R(A_2,A_3)=0.27`$), and between amplitudes and widths ($`R(A_1,\sigma _1)=0.20`$), but the detections are all confirmed.

As the table and figure show, we clearly detect multiple features in the power spectrum. The next question is whether the adiabatic perturbation, inflationary model set can produce models with similar features.

Using the same methods discussed below for cosmological parameter estimation, we use the data and our theoretically motivated database of $`𝒞_{\mathrm{}}`$ models to make Bayesian estimates of the positions and amplitudes of peaks in the power spectrum, for comparison with our model-independent fits. The last two columns of Table 5 show the results of this process (using the “weak prior” described below), and give results that agree very well with the phenomenologically measured parameters of the various features. This bolsters our confidence in the model set we use in the next section, to estimate cosmological parameters.

## 11 Cosmological Parameters

Our measurement of the CMB angular power spectrum can be used in conjunction with other cosmological information to constrain several cosmological parameters. Our method, described in detail in Lange et al. (2001), compares the measured angular power spectrum with the predicted power spectra from a family of theoretical models. We choose to compare our measurements with inflation-motivated adiabatic cold dark matter models, with the 7 cosmological parameters given in Table 6.

We take a Bayesian approach, calculating a likelihood of each model given the data, in the discrete parameter database of Table 6. We then marginalize over the continuous parameters such as theory normalization ($`\mathrm{ln}𝒞_{10}`$), calibration, and beam uncertainty for each model. To find confidence intervals on any given parameter, we marginalize over the other parameters by integrating through the database, collapsing the n-dimensional likelihood to a one-dimensional likelihood curve for that parameter.

In the comparison of the theoretical and measured power spectra, one must convolve the predicted theory power spectrum with the window function for each $`\mathrm{}`$ bin of the measurement. The flat band average of a target model $`𝒞_{\mathrm{}}^T=\mathrm{}(\mathrm{}+1)C_{\mathrm{}}^T/2\pi `$, can be defined with respect to a window function $`W_{\mathrm{}}^b`$ for that band as

$$𝒞_b^T=\frac{[W_{\mathrm{}}^b𝒞_{\mathrm{}}^T]}{[W_{\mathrm{}}^b]}$$
(12)
with

$$[f_{\mathrm{}}]=\underset{\mathrm{}}{}\frac{(\mathrm{}+\frac{1}{2})}{\mathrm{}(\mathrm{}+1)}f_{\mathrm{}}.$$
(13)
In the power spectrum estimation pipelines discussed above, we can choose to use shaped bands rather than flat. This will change the details of the window function, but the prescription for calculating theoretical band averages remains the same.

We have calculated the window functions for the FASTER power spectrum bins, using S+N weighting on the map. In Figure 12 we show the flat-band window functions, to illustrate their $`\mathrm{}`$-space shapes and the level of correlations between bands. Details on their derivation are given in Contaldi et al. (2002). For the MADCAP comparison with theory, we use tophat window functions.

We can also apply a series of “priors”, or prior probabilities, to each model in the database, modifying the likelihood of that model before marginalization. The priors we choose include a “weak prior” which sets the likelihood to zero if, for that model, the Hubble parameter ($`H_o=100h`$km/s/MPc) has a value outside the range $`0.45<h<0.90`$, the current age of the universe is less than 10 Gyr, or the total matter content $`\mathrm{\Omega }_M<0.1`$. We also investigate the effect of narrowing the prior on the Hubble constant to $`h=0.72\pm 0.08`$, as measured by the Hubble Key Project (Freedman et al., 2001).

We also examine the effect of a large-scale structure (LSS) prior. This is a joint constraint on $`\sigma _8^2`$, the bandpower of (linear) density fluctuations on a scale corresponding to rich clusters of galaxies ($`8h^1`$MPc), and on a shape parameter $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ characterizing the (linear) density power spectrum. The LSS prior probability distribution, described in detail in Bond et al. (2002), is slightly modified over that used in Lange et al. (2001) to agree better with weak lensing and clustering data. $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_m^{0.56}`$ = $`0.47_{.02,.08}^{+.02,+.11}`$, is distributed as a Gaussian (first error) convolved with a uniform (top-hat) distribution (second error), centered about 0.47; $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ = $`0.21_{.03,.08}^{+.03,+.08}`$ is a broad distribution over the 0.1 to 0.3 range. Here $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ = $`\mathrm{\Gamma }+(n_s1)/2`$, where $`\mathrm{\Gamma }\mathrm{\Omega }_mh\mathrm{exp}[\mathrm{\Omega }_B(1+\mathrm{\Omega }_m^1(2h)^{1/2})]`$ is a function of our basic cosmological parameters.

Our final set of priors combines the weak and LSS priors with the supernova data of Riess et al. (1998) and Perlmutter et al. (1999), and the assumption that the geometry of space is flat. In all cases, we use the COBE-DMR measurements (Bennett et al., 1996) to provide a valuable low-$`\mathrm{}`$ anchor for the power spectrum.

We are interested in the robustness of our parameter extraction to the details of the input power spectrum. Specifically, we would like to know if the small differences between different variations of the FASTER analysis, or between the final FASTER and MADCAP power spectra, lead to significant differences in cosmological results. In Figure 13 we show likelihood curves for six cosmological parameters derived using only the weak prior case, for several input versions of our angular power spectrum results. In all cases the likelihood curves are very similar, indicating the cosmological results are not very sensitive to the details of our analysis.

Having demonstrated the stability of our results, we now turn to extracting cosmological parameters from our angular power spectrum with the series of applied priors discussed above. Figures 14 and Figures 15 show a set of one dimensional likelihood curves for six parameters, derived from the data of Table 2, COBE-DMR, and the priors described above. Inspection of these figures shows that the parameter likelihoods derived from the FASTER and MADCAP results are very similar for each set of priors. This again demonstrates the stability of the cosmological results to the chosen analysis path. Numerical estimates of parameters derived from these curves are given in Table 6, where a similar comparison can be made.

## 12 Conclusions

In this paper we have presented an analysis of 50% more data from the 1998 Antarctic flight of Boomerang than previously treated. Our analysis is the most thorough to date, using two very different power spectrum estimation pipelines to derive the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The two methods show good agreement and, with the greater amount of data used, an increase in the precision of measured power spectrum. In particular, features in the power spectrum beyond the first peak (at $`\mathrm{}200`$) are detected with greater confidence. Given that such features are a natural consequence of standard cold dark matter dominated cosmological models with adiabatic initial density perturbations, their presence gives us greater confidence in the validity of that model set.

Within the context of these models we have estimated the the values of cosmological parameters using the results from both of our analysis methods. The resulting parameter values are insensitive to the small differences between the two results. At the increased precision with which we determine the cosmological parameters, we find that our results remain completely consistent with a flat $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-CDM cosmology.

The Boomerang project has been supported by NASA, NSF-OPP, and NERSC in the U.S., by PNRA, Universitá “La Sapienza”, and ASI in Italy, by PPARC in the UK, and by the CIAR and NSERC in Canada.


format: text

text:
# Some recent developments in gamma-ray burst afterglow and prompt emission models

## 1. Introduction

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) belong to one of those classes of mysterious objects whose nature took great efforts to identify. For years after their discovery, our knowledge about the objects had been limited to the “gamma-ray” in the spectral domain, and the “burst” in the temporal domain. The revolutionary discovery and the extensive hunting and monitoring of the broadband afterglows for dozens of GRBs greatly extended our knowledge about the events both in the spectral domain (from radio to X-rays) and in the temporal domain (from minutes to years). We now have some good knowledge about at least one subset of GRBs, i.e. the so-called long GRBs whose durations are longer than 2 seconds. These include that they are originated from cosmological distances, likely associated with the deaths of massive stars; that the afterglow is emission from the external forward shock when the fireball impacts the ambient interstellar medium (ISM); and that the fireballs are likely collimated at least for some GRBs (e.g., Piran 1999; van Paradjis, Kouveliotou, & Wijers 2000; Mészáros 2002). It is expected that some new progress will be made in the GRB study in the coming years, thanks to the observational advances led by some future space and ground-based multi-wavelength telescopes, especially by the two NASA missions, Swift and GLAST. Among others, the very early afterglows including the bridge between the GRB prompt phase and the afterglow phase will be carefully studied; the broad-band afterglow campaign will be extended to high energy (GeV-TeV) regimes; and a large sample of dataset combining the redshifts and the GRB prompt emission & afterglow properties will be available, leading to a global view of the GRB jet configuration and the identification of the GRB prompt emission site(s) and mechanism(s). Below we will review some recent theoretical efforts in anticipation of these upcoming observational breakthroughs.

## 2. Early afterglows

GRBs involve extremely relativistic bulk motion of the fireballs. At the time when most of the current afterglow observations are made (typically hours after the burst trigger), a fireball has already decelerated substantially to mildly relativistic (e.g. $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(t)20(E_{52}/n)^{1/8}[t_h/(1+z)]^{3/8}`$, where $`E_{52}`$ is the isotropic fireball energy in unit of $`10^{52}`$ ergs, $`n`$ is the ISM density, $`z`$ is the redshift, and $`t_h`$ is the epoch of observation in the observer frame in unit of hour), and the erratic central engine activity has usually ceased. Catching the detailed information in the very early epoch of the afterglow emission is of great interest in catching precious information about the fireball relativistic motion and the central engine behavior.

### 2.1. Early post-injection signatures

The observer’s time at the on-set of the afterglow emission is approximately $`t_{dec}2.4\mathrm{s}(E_{52}/n)^{1/3}`$ $`(\mathrm{\Gamma }_0/300)^{8/3}(1+z)`$, where $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$ is the “initial” bulk Lorentz factor of the fireball at the deceleration radius, which is scaled with a typical value, 300. This timescale is largely determined by the fireball intrinsic parameters $`E_{52}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_0`$, as well as the environmental parameter $`n`$. The time scale for the central engine activity, $`t_{eng}`$ on the other hand, is completely defined by the life time of the central engine (e.g. the life time of the black hole - torus system; the collapsar envelope fallback time scale; or the life time of the temporal strong toroidal magnetic field for the magnetar central engine case). This is usually manifested as the duration of the GRB (but in principle could be longer), which is found to vary substantially among bursts. These two time scales are independent, and as long as $`t_{eng}>t_{dec}`$, post-energy-injection into the fireball in the afterglow phase is inevitable.

Whether the post-injection behavior is noticeable depends on the comparison between the initial energy, $`E_{imp}`$, already entrained in the fireball and the additional energy input, $`E_{inj}`$. Only if the latter is comparable to or larger than the former, could the injection process leaves noticeable signatures in the afterglow lightcurves (Zhang & Mészáros 2002a). Also the central engine activity is expected to diminish at later times. Therefore the early afterglow phase is the most likely epoch to study the injection signatures.

The injection signatures depend on the nature of the injected energy flow. 1. If the GRB wind is mainly dominated by a cold, magnetic dominated component, as some GRB central engine models expect, the injection wind is likely to give an achromatic, gradual bumping signature in the broad-band afterglow lightcurves (Fig.1 of Zhang & Mészáros 2002a). One example of such a Poynting-dominated-injection is that from a strongly magnetized millisecond pulsar (Dai & Lu 1998; Zhang & Mészáros 2001a), which presents a well-defined, easy-modeling injection signature (Zhang & Mészáros 2002a). A detection of such a signature can give a possible identification of the GRB central engine otherwise poorly known. Whether a strong reverse shock is developed in such an injection case is unclear, and the contribution from the reverse shock is neglected in the current modeling. 2. In the conventional “hot” fireball scenario, the injected energy is typically in the form of the kinetic energy of the expanding shell. In a simple case, a fireball is composed of multi-minishells with increasing Lorentz factors at later times. Such a scenario is known as the “refreshed” shock scenario (Rees & Mészáros 1998; Sari & Mészáros 2000), and there is already a claim that such a scenario may be able to interpret the peculiar flat decaying lightcurves of GRB 010222 (Björnsson et al. 2002). In more complicated scenarios, an injection process is more appropriately viewed as the interactions among three shells (ISM, initial shell, and the injective shell). The hydrodynamics of such a process is analyzed in great detail in Zhang & Mészáros (2002a). Because multi-shocks are involved, the injection signatures for a violent collision are complicated (Fig.5 in Zhang & Mészáros 2002a). The recent peculiar wiggling R-band lightcurve of GRB 021004 may be modeled as such violent injection events, although other interpretations (e.g. Lazzati et al. 2002) may be also reasonable.

Other mechanisms to interpret lightcurve bumps include supernova contribution (e.g. Bloom et al. 1999), dust echo (Esin & Blandford 2000), collisions of the fireball with the ambient density bumps (Dai & Lu 2002a), and the gravitational microlensing effect (Garnavich, Loeb & Stanek 2000). The main differentiable character of an injection signature is that the afterglow level is systematically raised after the injection (Zhang & Mészáros 2002a).

### 2.2. Reverse shock emission

During the initial interaction of the fireball with the ISM, a reverse shock will cross the fireball shell and emit a comparable amount of energy as in the forward shell (Mészáros & Rees 1997). After the shell crossing, the shocked fireball cools adiabatically, leading to a fading emission component. The emission is peaked in the UV-optical band, and it has been claimed that the optical flash detected in GRB 990123 is due to such an emission component (Mészáros & Rees 1999; Sari & Piran 1999). Due to complicated regimes involved (Kobayashi & Sari 2000; Kobayashi 2000), a bright optical flash is not always expected to be detectable. In any case, when early afterglows are caught, the emission signatures dominated by the reverse shock should be attainable.

Thanks to the prompt localization by HETE II, lately the R-band afterglow of GRB 021004 was caught $``$ 9 minutes after the burst, marking the earliest record of catching GRB afterglows and the best monitored afterglow so far (see extensive observational reports in the GRB Coordinates Network, http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/gcn3\_archive.html). An apparent re-brightening in the R-band lightcurve is observed at around 0.1 day. Among other interpretations (e.g. Lazzati et al. 2002), Kobayashi & Zhang (2002) show that this re-brightening is well interpreted within the framework of the standard fireball model in which both the emissions from the forward shock and from the reverse shock are considered. The low-frequency (e.g. optical, IR & radio) lightcurve from the forward shock is expected to rise initially and to decay after the typical synchrotron frequency $`\nu _m`$ crosses the observational band (Fig.2b of Sari, Piran & Narayan 1998). Although such a behavior has been observed in the radio band, previous optical afterglow observations were only made at too late a time to catch the rising part of the lightcurve. Kobayashi & Zhang (2002) argue that such a phase was caught for GRB 021004, together with a rapid decaying ($`F_\nu t^2`$) emission component from the reverse shock. The superposition of both the forward shock and the reverse shock emissions can well fit for the 0.1-day re-brightening feature of the GRB 021004 R-band early afterglow. For the example case presented in Kobayashi & Zhang (2002), the standard shock parameters as inferred from other GRBs (Panaitescu & Kumar 2001, 2002) are adopted, and the model can also interpret the X-ray and radio afterglow data. This hints that such a re-brightening signature may be a common feature in early afterglows, which could be readily tested in the near future by the UVOT telescope on board Swift mission.

## 3. High energy afterglows

The term “high energy afterglow” is defined with respect to the conventional low-energy (X-ray, optical, radio) afterglows which are believed to be originated from the synchrotron emission of the electrons accelerated in the forward shocks as the fireball decelerates in the ISM. The origins of the possible high energy afterglows are well justified. There are several high energy spectral components in the standard shock scenario which are not important in the low energy band. These include the synchrotron self-inverse Compton (IC) emission of the electrons, and the baryon-related emission components such as the proton synchrotron emission, synchrotron emission from the secondary muons or direct $`\pi ^0`$ decay from the photomeson interactions. Zhang & Mészáros (2001b) presented a coherent study of the high energy spectral components with respect to the conventional synchrotron component, and discussed the shock parameter regimes in which various components dominate. Because baryons are redundant emitters compared with electrons, the baryon-related emission components can overwhelm the electron synchrotron emission only when the electron equipartition factor $`ϵ_e`$ is very small while the magnetic field is near equilibrium ($`ϵ_B1`$). On the other hand, there is a large parameter regime in the $`ϵ_eϵ_B`$ space that the IC component is important (regime II of Fig.1 in Zhang & Mészáros 2001b, typically $`ϵ_e/ϵ_B>1`$). It turns out that the current broadband afterglow fits result in typical $`ϵ_e`$ and $`ϵ_B`$ parameters which lie right in this IC-dominated regime (Panaitescu & Kumar 2001).

A direct consequence for these “typical” (regime II) GRBs is that the IC-origin high energy afterglows should be detectable. The IC emission forms a separate four-segment broken power law spectral component at the high energy end of the conventional synchrotron component (e.g. Sari & Esin 2000). As the blast wave decelerates, the two-hump spectrum will evolve towards down-left. Fixing a certain band, the observer will initially receive power-law-decaying synchrotron emission until, at a critical time $`t_{_{\mathrm{IC}}}`$, the IC component overtakes the synchrotron component. For the electron power-law index $`p=2.2`$, this critical time is (Zhang & Mészáros 2001b)

$$t_{_{\mathrm{IC}}}=3.4\mathrm{days}(ϵ_e/0.5)^{0.89}(ϵ_B/0.01)^{0.08}E_{52}^{0.06}n^{0.66}(1+z)^{0.36}\nu _{18}^{0.68}$$
(1)
After $`t_{_{\mathrm{IC}}}`$, the lightcurve then climbs up until reaching the peak flux of the IC component, and declines later after $`\nu _{m,\mathrm{IC}}`$ crosses the band. This results in a bumping signature in the fixed band lightcurve. Equation (1) shows that in order to have a noticeable signature at an early time, the frequency has to be high enough (X-ray upwards), and a dense environment tends to ease the IC-dominant condition. Late X-ray bump in the GRB 000926 has been attributed to the IC high energy afterglow (Harrison et al. 2001).

At higher frequencies, the IC-dominated era as well as the IC peak time move to earlier epochs. For the nominal GLAST band (0.4-200 GeV), the afterglow is dominated by the IC component as soon as the afterglow starts, and the IC peak sweeps the band in about an hour. Given the GLAST sensitivity, a typical regime II GRB at $`z=1`$ could be detected by GLAST from minutes to about a day after the trigger, leading to an extended high energy afterglow (Fig.4 of Zhang & Mészáros 2001b). According to this scenario, the long term GeV emission detected by EGRET in GRB 940217 (Hurley et al. 1994) may have been due to such an IC component for a nearby GRB (see also Mészáros & Rees 1994; Dermer, Chiang & Mitman 2000).

Besides this standard model, an extended GeV afterglow may be also interpreted by some alternative mechanisms. One possibility is the secondary IC scattering off the microwave background photons by the pairs produced by the TeV gamma-rays generated in the GRB internal shocks through interacting with the IR background photons (Dai & Lu 2002b), if the intergalactic magnetic field is not strong enough for prominent lepton reflection to occur. Another possibility is the direct interaction of the GRB fireball with the hot ambient pulsar wind nebula (Wang, Dai & Lu 2002; Granot & Guetta 2002). Future detailed data from GLAST and other space or ground-based high energy telescopes will provide clues to differentiate among these scenarios.

## 4. A quasi-universal structured jet model

Achromatic steepening of the afterglow lightcurves infer that most long GRBs, if not all, are originated from collimated jets. Frail et al. (2001) collected a sample of GRBs with redshift and jet break measurements before Oct. 2000, and found the remarkable fact that the product of the “isotropic” gamma-ray energy and the square of the inferred jet angle is a standard value, i.e., $`E_\gamma =E_{iso}\theta _j^2\mathrm{const}`$. The $`\theta _j`$ angle is obtained from the jet breaking time by assuming the simplest uniform sharp-edge jet configuration (Rhoads 1999; Sari, Piran & Halpern 1999; Panaitescu & Mészáros 1999; Moderski et al. 2000; Huang et al. 2000; Granot et al. 2001) and by assuming a roughly constant ambient ISM density ($`n1\mathrm{cm}^3`$). Although $`n`$ could in principle vary from burst to burst, that most of the later-observed GRBs seem to fall into the Frail et al. (2001)’s empirical law suggests that the collimated jets are indeed the promising interpretation of the lightcurve breaks, and that $`n`$ is not fluctuating significantly. Within the conventional uniform jet model, the jet aperture solid angle is proportional to $`\theta _j^2`$, so that the finding of Frail et al. (2001) suggests that long GRBs have a quasi-standard energy reservoir, although such a standard energy budget is distributed with different concentrations among different bursts.

The same data may be interpreted within another, probably more elegant, picture. Stimulated by Frail et al (2001)’s result, Rossi, Lazzati & Rees (2002a) and Zhang & Mészáros (2002b) have independently shown that the wide variety of burst phenomenology could be attributed to a standard non-uniform jet configuration being viewed from different orientations. The jet is structured such that the closer to the jet axis, the more energy is concentrated and the higher the bulk Lorentz factor is achieved. The jet break angles as inferred from the observational break times are a manifest of the observer’s viewing angle rather than the real jet opening angle. The shape of the jet structure is modeled as a power-law, i.e., $`ϵ(\theta )\theta ^k`$, and for $`k2`$, such an interpretation is almost non-differentiable from the conventional uniform jet model. Zhang & Mészáros (2002b) further proposed that the observed jet breaks can be interpreted within such a scenario for a much broader categories of the energy distribution functions (e.g. no longer a power law, or even not a simple analytical form) of the jets. The lightcurve predictions for these configurations as well as for all the $`k2`$ power-law configurations are not solely equivalent to the predictions from the conventional jet model (R. Sari, personal communication), but the conventional model is not fully satisfactory anyway (e.g. a large dispersion of the electron power law indices $`p`$ as inferred from the broadband afterglow fits, while computer simulations on the shock acceleration indicate that $`p`$ is likely universal). A closer study on the structured jet model both analytically and numerically (although may not be easy) is therefore desirable.

Although the conventional jet model is not easily ruled out, there are already several arguments in favor of the universal structured jet model. 1. To interpret the spectral-lag vs. luminosity correlations found in the GRB prompt emission data (Norris et al. 2000), one natural way is to incorporate a structured jet configuration and the line-of-sight effect (Salmonson 2001; Salmonson & Galama 2002; Norris 2002). A coherent picture is achievable for both the prompt emission and the afterglow within the framework of the universal jet model. 2. Within the top candidate of the progenitor models, i.e., the collapsar model, a structured jet configuration is naturally expected from numerical modeling (Woosley et al. 2002; Zhang et al. 2002). 3. A prediction about GRB luminosity function is available for the universal jet model (but not for the conventional jet model), which is a power law with index around 2 (Rossi et al. 2002a; Zhang & Mészáros 2002b). Such a prediction is consistent with the GRB luminosity function derived from the prompt emission data (Schaefer et al. 2001; Schmidt 2001) or even with the one measured directly from those bursts with luminosity information (Perna, Sari & Frail 2002).

There are several ways to differentiate the universal jet model from the conventional jet model. 1. Besides the well-defined luminosity function testable in the Swift era (which can add proofs or constraints on the universal jet model but not on the conventional jet model due to the lack of the prediction power of the latter), the GRB-to-orphan afterglow rate are different between different models (e.g. Totani & Panaitescu 2002). Future detections of the orphan afterglows as well as their statistics may shed light onto the issue, although the orphan afterglows arising from the dirty fireballs may complicate the clean picture (Huang, Dai & Lu 2002). 2. The different afterglow polarization predictions for both models may be helpful to tell the difference (Rossi et al. 2002b). 3. Future gravitational radiation polarization data may shed light on the correctness of the universal jet scenario (Kobayashi & Mészáros 2002).

## 5. Prompt emission models

Despite of the extensive observational campaigns and theoretical modeling of the afterglows, the nature of the GRB prompt emission is not fully understood. The location and mechanism of the prompt emission or even the energy context of the fireball are not unambiguously identified, leading to a variety of the cosmological fireball model variants.

Most generically, a fireball consists of a hot component with luminosity $`L_h`$ (which is essentially the conventional fireball initially composed of in-equilibrium photons and pairs, and which is accelerated and coasted until the energy is stored in the form of the kinetic energy) and a cold component with luminosity $`L_c`$ (which is essentially of the form of a Poynting flux, analogous to the case of a pulsar wind). A parameter, $`\sigma L_c/L_h`$, can be defined to categorize the fireball. Based on the proposed emission site of the GRB prompt emission, the GRB models can be also divided into the external models (where the prompt emission occurs at the deceleration radius, i.e., $`r=r_{dec}`$), internal models (where the prompt emission occurs before deceleration but beyond the photosphere, i.e. $`r_{ph}<r<r_{dec}`$), and the innermost models (where the prompt emission occurs right above the photosphere, i.e. $`r\stackrel{>}{}r_{ph}`$). A unified picture of these model variants is analyzed in Zhang & Mészáros (2002c).

It is not a easy task to identify the very mechanism(s) responsible for the observed GRB prompt emission. In any case, for those well-studied models, clear predictions are available which could be directly compared against the current and future data. Besides the complex lightcurve information which requires erratic central engine behaviors or a clumpy ambient environment, the spectral information, especially the information about the spectral break, $`E_p`$, can provide some useful clues. Two interesting issues include (1) the distribution of the measured $`E_p`$ within different bursts or among various epochs of one single burst (which is found to be narrowly distributed for the bright BATSE bursts, Preece et al. 2000), and (2) the possible correlation of $`E_p`$ with other measurable parameters (e.g. a positive correlation between $`E_p`$ and luminosity $`L`$, Amati et al. 2002; Lloyd-Ronning & Ramirez-Ruiz 2002). Assuming synchrotron radiation as the mechanism, Zhang & Mészáros (2002c) have compiled all the predictions of $`E_p`$ as functions of various measurable parameters as well as some unknown parameters (their Table 1). Adopting some distribution functions of the parameters (either from the observations or from the assumptions), they modeled the narrowness of the $`E_p`$ distributions for various models. The results are compared against the current data. Although any unambiguous clue for the identification of the “right” model is not yet available, some important constraints have been posed on various models.

1. About the width of $`E_p`$ distribution: None of the current GRB models can reproduce the narrow $`E_p`$ distribution found by Preece et al. (2000), including the well-discussed internal shock and the external shock models. A narrow $`E_p`$ distribution favors those models whose $`E_p`$ prediction relies on less free parameters with low power indices. A high $`\sigma `$ internal model or a pair-dominated internal model are good in this respect due to their (essentially) constant $`E_p^{}`$ value in the comoving frame. However, these models are less studied compared to the standard optically-thin shock scenarios. There are two issues that may bring data closer to the predictions in the shock models. First, the growing population of the so-called X-ray flashes (XRFs, Heise et al. 2001; Kippen et al. 2001) may broaden the real $`E_p`$ distribution. Second, there may be some intrinsic conspiracy among some parameters in the shock models which tend to narrow the final $`E_p`$ distribution. In any case, the internal scenarios are generally favored against the external scenarios, and the IC-origin GRB models are less favored than the synchrotron models since they tend to amplify the $`E_p`$ scatters. A recent “supercritical pile” model invoking resonant baryonic pair production instability (Kazanas et al. 2002) seems to be favorable in interpreting the narrow $`E_p`$ distribution. It is of interest to investigate the compatibility of this model with other observational aspects.

2. About the positive $`E_pL`$ correlation: Whether a model is compatible with the positive $`E_pL`$ correlation (Amati et al. 2002; Lloyd-Ronning 2002) depend on the unknown $`L\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ correlation, where $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is the bulk Lorentz factor. For the most straightforward scenario in which $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is positively correlated with $`L`$, the internal shock model is not favored, essentially because the model predicts a lower $`E_p`$ for a larger $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ since a larger $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ corresponds a larger shock dissipation radius where the magnetic field is lower. The internal high-$`\sigma `$ model or the internal pair-rich model are however compatible with the data. In order to make the internal shock model remain a promising candidate, essentially no correlation between $`L`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is required.

3. About the nature of X-ray flashes (XRF): The XRFs (Heise et al. 2001; Kippen et al. 2001) and GRBs are likely different appearances of a same type of event. In various models, the $`E_p`$ scatter is caused by the contribution of the scatters of many independent parameters. Thus it is not straightforward to regard the scatter of one particular parameter (e.g., Lorentz factor or redshift) as the reason for the XRF/GRB discrimination. Nonetheless, a direct reasoning from the “Lorentz boost” argument is that XRFs are dirty fireballs while GRBs are clean fireballs (e.g. Dermer et al. 1999). This interpretation, together the standard structured jet configuration as discussed in Section 4, suggests that XRFs are those GRBs viewed at large viewing angles (e.g. Woosley et al. 2002). A premise of such an interpretation, however, is that prompt emission is not from internal shocks because the internal shock model expects high $`E_p`$’s for dirty fireballs. An alternative interpretation of the XRFs and X-ray rich GRBs is in terms of the standard shock model with the dominant emission components from either the baryonic or the pair photospheres (Mészáros et al. 2002). Spectral and redshift information for XRFs would be essential to testify these interpretations.

## 6. Conclusions

A new epoch for the GRB study is coming within the next several years, especially following the launches of Swift and GLAST, and the utilization of some other broad-band advanced facilities. It is optimistic to expect the following breakthroughs in the coming years:

$``$ Early afterglows will be carefully studied. The missing link between the prompt emission and the afterglow will be identified, including the detailed reverse shock information. The information from the central engine may be retrievable through well-modeled injection signatures.

$``$ High energy afterglows will be monitored and studied in conjunction with the low energy afterglows, which will bring invaluable information about the unknown shock physics and the GRB environments.

$``$ The GRB jet configuration will be identified. We expect the universal structured jet model will be validated by future data.

$``$ With accumulation of a large sample of the redshift and spectral information for GRBs/XRFs in the Swift era, the right emission site(s) and mechanism(s) for the prompt emission may be identified (or at least strongly constrained). The fireball content and the nature of the relativistic wind from the central engine may be also understood.

#### Acknowledgments.

We thank Shiho Kobayashi for stimulating collaborations. This work is supported by NASA grants NAG5-9192 and NAG5-9153.

## References

Amati, L. et al. 2002, A&A, 390, 81

Björnsson, G., Hjorth, J. Pedersen, K., & Fynbo, J. U. 2002, ApJ, 579, L59

Bloom, J. S., et al. 1999, Nature, 401, 453

Dai, Z. G. & Lu, T. 1998, Phys. Rev. Lett., 81, 4301

Dai, Z. G. & Lu, T. 2002a, ApJ, 565, L87

Dai, Z. G. & Lu, T. 2002b, ApJ, in press (astro-ph/0203084)

Dermer, C. D., Chiang, J., & Bottcher, M. 1999, ApJ, 513, 656

Dermer, C. D., Chiang, J., & Mitman, K. E. 2000, ApJ, 537, 785

Esin, A. A. & Blandford, R. D. 2000, ApJ, 534, L151

Frail, D. A., et al. 2001, ApJ, 562, L55

Garnavich, P., Loeb, A., & Stanek, K. 2000, ApJ, 544, L11

Granot, J., & Guetta, D. 2002, (astro-ph/0211136)

Granot, J. et al. 2001, (astro-ph/0103038)

Harrison, F. A. et al. 2001, ApJ, 558, 442

Heise, J. in ’t Zant, J., Kippen, R. M. & Woods, P. M. 2001, (astro-ph/0111246)

Huang, Y. F., Dai, Z. G., & Lu, T. 2002, MNRAS, 332, 735

Huang, Y. F., Gou, L. J., Dai, Z. G., & Lu, T. 2000, ApJ, 543, 90

Hurley, K. et al. 1994, Nature, 372, 652

Kazanas, D., Georganopoulos, M., & Mastichiadis, A. 2002, ApJ, 578, L15

Kippen, R. M. et al. 2001, (astro-ph/0102277)

Kobayashi, S. 2000, ApJ, 545, 807

Kobayashi, S., & Sari, R. 2000, ApJ, 542, 819

Kobayashi, S., & Mészáros, P. 2002, ApJL, in preparation

Kobayashi, S., & Zhang, B. 2002, ApJL, accepted (astro-ph/0210584)

Lazzati, D. et al. 2002, A&A Letters, accepted (astro-ph/0210333)

Lloyd-Ronning, N. M., & Ramirez-Ruiz, E. 2002, ApJ, 576, 101

Mészáros, P. 2002, ARA&A, 40, 137

Mészáros, P., Ramirez-Ruiz, E., Rees, M. J. & Zhang, B. 2002, ApJ, 578, 812

Mészáros, P., & Rees, M. J. 1994, MNRAS, 269, L41

Mészáros, P., & Rees, M. J. 1997, ApJ, 476, 232

Mészáros, P., & Rees, M. J. 1999, MNRAS, 306, L39

Moderski, R., Sikora, M., & Bulik, T. 2000, ApJ, 529, 151

Norris, J. P. 2002, ApJ, 579, 386

Norris, J. P., Marani, G., & Bonnell, J. 2000, ApJ, 534, 248

Panaitescu, A., & Kumar, P. 2001, ApJ, 560, L49

Panaitescu, A., & Kumar, P. 2002, ApJ, 571, 779

Panaitescu, A., & Mészáros, P. 1999, ApJ, 526, 707

Perna, R., Sari, R., & Frail, D. 2002, preprint

Piran, T. 1999, Phys. Rep., 314, 575

Preece, R. D., et al. 2000, ApJS, 126, 19

Rees, M. J., & Mészáros, P. 1998, ApJ, 496, L1

Rhoads, J. E. 1999, ApJ, 525, 737

Rossi, E., Lazzati, D., & Rees, M. J. 2002a, MNRAS, 332, 945

Rossi, E., Lazzati, D., Salmonson, J. D. & Ghisellini, G. 2002b, (astro-ph/0211020)

Salmonson, J. D. 2001, ApJ, 546, L29

Salmonson, J. D., & Galama, T. J. 2002, ApJ, 569, 682

Sari, R., & Esin, A. A. 2001, ApJ, 548, 787

Sari, R., & Mészáros, P. 2000, ApJ, 535, L33

Sari, R., & Piran, T. 1999, ApJ, 517, L109

Sari, R., Piran, T, & Halpern, J. P. 1999, ApJ, 519, L17

Sari, R., Piran, T., & Narayan, R. 1998, ApJ, 497, L17

Schaefer, B. E., Deng, M., & Band, D. L. 2001, ApJ, 563, L123

Schmidt, M. 2001, ApJ, 552, 36

Totani, T., & Panaitescu, A. 2002, ApJ, 576, 120

van Paradijs, J., Kouveliotou, C., & Wijers, R. A. M. J. 2000, ARA&A, 38, 379

Wang, X. Y., Dai, Z. G., & Lu, T. 2002, MNRAS, 336, 803

Woosley, S. E., Zhang, W., & Heger, A. 2002, (astro-ph/0206004)

Zhang, B., & Mészáros, P. 2001a, ApJ, 552, L35

Zhang, B., & Mészáros, P. 2001b, ApJ, 559, 110

Zhang, B., & Mészáros, P. 2002a, ApJ, 566, 712

Zhang, B., & Mészáros, P. 2002b, ApJ, 571, 876

Zhang, B., & Mészáros, P. 2002c, ApJ, 581, in press (astro-ph/0206158)

Zhang, W., Woosley, S. E., & MacFadyen, A. I. 2002, ApJ, submitted (astro-ph/0207436)