BeyondPlanck VII. Bayesian estimation of gain and absolute calibration
  for CMB experiments
  We present a Bayesian calibration algorithm for CMB observations as
implemented within the global end-to-end BeyondPlanck (BP) framework, and apply
this to the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) data. Following the most
recent Planck analysis, we decompose the full time-dependent gain into a sum of
three orthogonal components: One absolute calibration term, common to all
detectors; one time-independent term that can vary between detectors; and one
time-dependent component that is allowed to vary between one-hour pointing
periods. Each term is then sampled conditionally on all other parameters in the
global signal model through Gibbs sampling. The absolute calibration is sampled
using only the orbital dipole as a reference source, while the two relative
gain components are sampled using the full sky signal, including the orbital
and Solar CMB dipoles, CMB fluctuations, and foreground contributions. We
discuss various aspects of the data that influence gain estimation, including
the dipole/polarization quadrupole degeneracy and anomalous jumps in the
instrumental gain. Comparing our solution to previous pipelines, we find good
agreement in general, with relative deviations of -0.84% (-0.67%) for 30 GHz,
-0.14% (0.02%) for 44 GHz and -0.69% (-0.08%) for 70 GHz, compared to Planck
2018 (NPIPE). The deviations we find are within expected error bounds, and we
attribute them to differences in data usage and general approach between the
pipelines. In particular, the BP calibration is performed globally, resulting
in better inter-frequency consistency. Additionally, WMAP observations are used
actively in the BP analysis, which breaks degeneracies in the Planck data set
and results in better agreement with WMAP. Although our presentation and
algorithm are currently oriented toward LFI processing, the procedure is fully
generalizable to other experiments.
