No Arabic abstract
A linear polarization field on a surface is expressed in terms of scalar functions, providing an invariant separation into two components; one of these is the B mode, important as a signature of primordial gravitational waves, which would lend support to the inflation hypothesis. The case of a plane already exhibits the key ideas, including the formal analogy with a vector field decomposed into gradient plus curl, with the B mode like the latter. The formalism is generalized to a spherical surface using cartesian coordinates. Analysis of global data provides a path to vector and tensor spherical harmonics.
We describe the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization experiment called Polarbear. This experiment will use the dedicated Huan Tran Telescope equipped with a powerful 1,200-bolometer array receiver to map the CMB polarization with unprecedented accuracy. We summarize the experiment, its goals, and current status.
B-modes in CMB polarization from patchy reionization arise from two effects: generation of polarization from scattering of quadrupole moments by reionization bubbles, and fluctuations in the screening of E-modes from recombination. The scattering contribution has been studied previously, but the screening contribution has not yet been calculated. We show that on scales smaller than the acoustic scale (l>300), the B-mode power from screening is larger than the B-mode power from scattering. The ratio approaches a constant ~2.5 below the damping scale (l>2000). On degree scales relevant for gravitational waves (l<100), screening B-modes have a white noise tail and are subdominant to the scattering effect. These results are robust to uncertainties in the modeling of patchy reionization.
We present a demonstration of delensing the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization anisotropy. This process of reducing the gravitational-lensing generated B-mode component will become increasingly important for improving searches for the B modes produced by primordial gravitational waves. In this work, we delens B-mode maps constructed from multi-frequency SPTpol observations of a 90 deg$^2$ patch of sky by subtracting a B-mode template constructed from two inputs: SPTpol E-mode maps and a lensing potential map estimated from the $textit{Herschel}$ $500,mu m$ map of the CIB. We find that our delensing procedure reduces the measured B-mode power spectrum by 28% in the multipole range $300 < ell < 2300$; this is shown to be consistent with expectations from theory and simulations and to be robust against systematics. The null hypothesis of no delensing is rejected at $6.9 sigma$. Furthermore, we build and use a suite of realistic simulations to study the general properties of the delensing process and find that the delensing efficiency achieved in this work is limited primarily by the noise in the lensing potential map. We demonstrate the importance of including realistic experimental non-idealities in the delensing forecasts used to inform instrument and survey-strategy planning of upcoming lower-noise experiments, such as CMB-S4.
We develop a systematic and unified approach to estimate all possible secondary (i.e. non-primordial) nonlinear effects to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization, named curve-of-sight integration approach. In this approach, the Boltzmann equation for polarized photons is rewritten in a line-of-sight integral along an exact geodesic in the perturbed universe, rather than a geodesic in the background universe used in the linear-order CMB calculation. This approach resolves the difficulty to solve the Boltzmann hierarchy with the nonlinear gravitational effects in the photon free-streaming regime and thus unifies the standard remapping approach for CMB lensing into the direct approach solving the Boltzmann equation for the nonlinear collisional effects. In this paper, we derive formulae that: (i) include all the nonlinear effects; (ii) can treat extended sources such as the contributions after the reionization. It offers a solid framework to discuss possible systematics in the standard estimation of CMB lensing by the remapping approach. As an explicit demonstration, we estimate the secondary B-mode power spectrum induced by all foreground gravitational effects: lensing, redshift, time-delay, emission-angle, and polarization-rotation effects. We define these effects properly so that they do not have any overlap, also without overlooking any effect. Then, we show that these effects only give corrections of the order of 0.001-0.01% to the standard lensing-induced B-mode power spectrum in the concordance $Lambda$ cold dark matter model. Our result confirms the reliability of using the remapping approach in upcoming CMB experiments aiming to detect the primordial gravitational waves with the tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r sim 10^{-3}$.
The concept of boundary plays an important role in several branches of general relativity, e.g., the variational principle for the Einstein equations, the event horizon and the apparent horizon of black holes, the formation of trapped surfaces. On the other hand, in a branch of mathematics known as geometric measure theory, the usefulness has been discovered long ago of yet another concept, i.e., the reduced boundary of a finite-perimeter set. This paper proposes therefore a definition of finite-perimeter sets and their reduced boundary in general relativity. Moreover, a basic integral formula of geometric measure theory is evaluated explicitly in the relevant case of Euclidean Schwarzschild geometry, for the first time in the literature. This research prepares the ground for a measure-theoretic approach to several concepts in gravitational physics, supplemented by geometric insight. Moreover, such an investigation suggests considering the possibility that the in-out amplitude for Euclidean quantum gravity should be evaluated over finite-perimeter Riemannian geometries that match the assigned data on their reduced boundary. As a possible application, an analysis is performed of the basic formulae leading eventually to the corrections of the intrinsic quantum mechanical entropy of a black hole.