Galactic Contamination in the QMAP Experiment

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Abstract
We quantify the level of foreground contamination in the QMAP cosmic microwave background data with two objectives: (1) to measure the level to which the QMAP power spectrum measurements need to be corrected for foregrounds and (2) to use this data set to further refine current foreground models. We cross-correlate the QMAP data with a variety of foreground templates. The 30 GHz Ka-band data are found to be significantly correlated with the Haslam 408 MHz and Reich & Reich 1420 MHz synchrotron maps but not with the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment 240, 140, and 100 μm maps or the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper survey. The 40 GHz Q band has no significant template correlations. We discuss the constraints that this places on synchrotron, free-free, and dust emission. We also reanalyze the foreground-cleaned Ka-band data and find that the two band power measurements are lowered by 2.3% and 1.3%, respectively.