Removing 1/f noise stripes in cosmic microwave background anisotropy observations

Removal of systematic effects is crucial in present and future CMB experiments mapping large fraction of the sky. Accurate CMB measurements ask for multi-feed array instruments observing the sky with a redundant scanning strategy covering the same sky region on different time scales and with different detectors for a better control of systematic effects. We investigate the capability to suppress 1/f noise features in Time Ordered Data (TOD) by using the destriping technique described in Maino et al. (1999), under realistic assumptions for crossing condition between different scan circles and sky signal fluctuations on small angular scales. We perform, as a working case, PLANCK-LFI simulated observations with few arcminutes pixel size convolved with LFI beam resolutions. In the noiseless case for crossing condition based on pixels with side larger than the input one, the destriping algorithm inserts extra-noise in the final map of the order of ~ mu K in rms and few mu K in peak-to-peak amplitude at 30 GHz. However including instrumental noise (white and 1/f noise) in the TOD, the impact of the sky signal on the destriping is found to be very small. In addition, for crossing condition based on pixels with side half of the one of the final map (typically ~ 1/3 of the FWHM), we find only a small improvement ( ~ 1% level) in the destriping quality with respect to the case when crossings are searched on pixels with same size of the final map one. We can conclude that the receiver noise is the driver for destriping quality. We extend the analysis to high values of the knee frequency and find that, although significantly suppressed by destriping, the residual additional noise rms is ~ 31% larger than the pure white noise rms at f_k = 1 Hz which could be a critical issue in the extraction of CMB angular power spectrum. We verified that the approximation of the 1/f noise on averaged scan circles as a single baseline still works well even for these high values of the knee frequency. Furthermore, by comparing simulations with different noise levels and different sampling rates, we find that the destriping quality does not significantly depend on the receiver sensitivity whereas it improves proportionally to the improvement of sampling rate. Therefore given a noise level, the higher the sampling rate, the better the destriping quality. This paper is based upon PLANCK-LFI activities.