Interferometric Observation of Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies

Abstract

We present a formalism for analyzing interferometric observations of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy and polarization data. The formalism is based upon the ell-space expansion of the angular power spectrum favoured in recent years. Explicit discussions of maximum likelihood analysis, power spectrum reconstruction, parameter estimation, imaging and polarization are given. As an example, several calculations for the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI) and Cosmic Background Interferometer (CBI) experiments are presented.