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We study systematic effects from half-wave plates (HWPs) for cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments using full-sky time-domain beam convolution simulations. Using an optical model for a fiducial spaceborne two-lens refractor telescope, we investigate how different HWP configurations optimized for dichroic detectors centred at 95 and 150 GHz impact the reconstruction of primordial B-mode polarization. We pay particular attention to possible biases arising from the interaction of frequency dependent HWP non-idealities with polarized Galactic dust emission and the interaction between the HWP and the instrumental beam. To produce these simulations, we have extended the capabilities of the publicly available beamconv code. To our knowledge, we produce the first time-domain simulations that include both HWP non-idealities and realistic full-sky beam convolution. Our analysis shows how certain achromatic HWP configurations produce significant systematic polarization angle offsets that vary for sky components with different frequency dependence. Our analysis also demonstrates that once we account for interactions with HWPs, realistic beam models with non-negligible cross-polarization and sidelobes will cause significant B-mode residuals that will have to be extensively modelled in some cases.
We address in this work the instrumental systematic errors that can potentially affect the forthcoming and future Cosmic Microwave Background experiments aimed at observing its polarized emission. In particular, we focus on the systematics induced by the beam and calibration, which are considered the major sources of leakage from total intensity measurements to polarization. We simulated synthetic data sets with Time-Ordered Astrophysics Scalable Tools, a publicly available simulation and data analysis package. We also propose a mitigation technique aiming at reducing the leakage by means of a template fitting approach. This technique has shown promising results reducing the leakage by 2 orders of magnitude at the power spectrum level when applied to a realistic simulated data set of the LiteBIRD satellite mission.
A great deal of experimental effort is currently being devoted to the precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky in temperature and polarisation. Satellites, balloon-borne, and ground-based experiments scrutinize the CMB sky at multiple scales, and therefore enable to investigate not only the evolution of the early Universe, but also its late-time physics with unprecedented accuracy. The pipeline leading from time ordered data as collected by the instrument to the final product is highly structured. Moreover, it has also to provide accurate estimates of statistical and systematic uncertainties connected to the specific experiment. In this paper, we review likelihood approaches targeted to the analysis of the CMB signal at different scales, and to the estimation of key cosmological parameters. We consider methods that analyze the data in the spatial (i.e., pixel-based) or harmonic domain. We highlight the most relevant aspects of each approach and compare their performance.
A millimeter-wave survey over half the sky, that spans frequencies in the range of 30 to 350 GHz, and that is both an order of magnitude deeper and of higher-resolution than currently funded surveys would yield an enormous gain in understanding of both fundamental physics and astrophysics. By providing such a deep, high-resolution millimeter-wave survey (about 0.5 uK-arcmin noise and 15 arcsecond resolution at 150 GHz), CMB-HD will enable major advances. It will allow 1) the use of gravitational lensing of the primordial microwave background to map the distribution of matter on small scales (k~10/hMpc), which probes dark matter particle properties. It will also allow 2) measurements of the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects on small scales to map the gas density and gas pressure profiles of halos over a wide field, which probes galaxy evolution and cluster astrophysics. In addition, CMB-HD would allow us to cross critical thresholds in fundamental physics: 3) ruling out or detecting any new, light (< 0.1eV), thermal particles, which could potentially be the dark matter, and 4) testing a wide class of multi-field models that could explain an epoch of inflation in the early Universe. Such a survey would also 5) monitor the transient sky by mapping the full observing region every few days, which opens a new window on gamma-ray bursts, novae, fast radio bursts, and variable active galactic nuclei. Moreover, CMB-HD would 6) provide a census of planets, dwarf planets, and asteroids in the outer Solar System, and 7) enable the detection of exo-Oort clouds around other solar systems, shedding light on planet formation. CMB-HD will deliver this survey in 5 years of observing half the sky, using two new 30-meter-class off-axis cross-Dragone telescopes to be located at Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert. The telescopes will field about 2.4 million detectors (600,000 pixels) in total.
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing is an integrated effect whose kernel is greater than half the peak value in the range $1<z<5$. Measuring this effect offers a powerful tool to probe the large-scale structure of the Universe at high redshifts. With the increasing precision of ongoing CMB surveys, other statistics than the lensing power spectrum, in particular the lensing bi-spectrum, will be measured at high statistical significance. This will provide ways to improve the constraints on cosmological models and lift degeneracies. Following on an earlier paper, we test analytical predictions of the CMB lensing bi-spectrum against full-sky lensing simulations, and discuss their validity and limitation in detail. The tree-level prediction of perturbation theory agrees with the simulation only up to $ellsim 200$, but the one-loop order allows capturing the simulation results up to $ellsim 600$. We also show that analytical predictions based on fitting formulas for the matter bi-spectrum agree reasonably well with simulation results, although the precision of the agreement depends on the configurations and scales considered. For instance, the agreement is at the $10%$-level for the equilateral configuration at multipoles up to $ellsim2000$, but the difference in the squeezed limit raises to more than a factor of two at $ellsim2000$. This discrepancy appears to come from limitations in the fitting formula of the matter bi-spectrum. We also find that the analytical prediction for the post-Born correction to the bi-spectrum is in good agreement with the simulation. We conclude by discussing the bi-spectrum prediction in some theories of modified gravity.
Missions such as WMAP or Planck measure full-sky fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background and foregrounds, among which bright compact source emissions cover a significant fraction of the sky. To accurately estimate the diffuse components, the point-source emissions need to be separated from the data, which requires a dedicated processing. We propose a new technique to estimate the flux of the brightest point sources using a morphological separation approach: point sources with known support and shape are separated from diffuse emissions that are assumed to be sparse in the spherical harmonic domain. This approach is compared on both WMAP simulations and data with the standard local chi2 minimization, modelling the background as a low-order polynomial. The proposed approach generally leads to 1) lower biases in flux recovery, 2) an improved root mean-square error of up to 35% and 3) more robustness to background fluctuations at the scale of the source. The WMAP 9-year point-source-subtracted maps are available online.