We estimate the spectral index, beta , of polarized synchrotron emission as observed in the 9 yr Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe sky maps using two methods, linear regression ("T-T plot") and ...maximum likelihood. We partition the sky into 24 disjoint sky regions and evaluate the spectral index for all polarization angles between 0degrees and 85degrees in steps of 5degrees.Averaging over polarization angles,we derive a mean spectral index of beta super(all-sky) = -2.99+ or -0.01 in the frequency range of 23-33 GHz. We find that the synchrotron spectral index steepens by 0.14 from low to high Galactic latitudes, in agreement with previous studies, with mean spectral indices of beta super(plane) = -2.98 + or - 0.01 and beta super(high-lat) = -3.12 + or - 0.04. In addition, we find a significant longitudinal variation along the Galactic plane with a steeper spectral index toward the Galactic center and anticenter than toward the Galactic spiral arms. This can be well modeled by an offset sinusoidal, beta (l) = -2.85 + 0.17 sin(2l - 90degrees). Finally, we study synchrotron emission in the BICEP2 field, in an attempt to understand whether the claimed detection of large-scale B-mode polarization could be explained in terms of synchrotron contamination. Adopting a spectral index of beta = -3.12, typical for high Galactic latitudes, we find that the most likely bias corresponds to about 2% of the reported signal (r = 0.003). The flattest index allowed by the data in this region is beta = -2.5, and under the assumption of a straight power-law frequency spectrum, we find that synchrotron emission can account for at most 20% of the reported BICEP2 signal.
We constrain the spectral index of polarized synchrotron emission,
β
s
, by correlating the recently released 2.3 GHz
S
-Band Polarization All Sky Survey (
S
-PASS) data with the 23 GHz 9-year
...Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) sky maps. We subdivide the S-PASS field, which covers the southern ecliptic hemisphere, into 95 15° ×15° regions and estimate the spectral index of polarized synchrotron emission within each region using a simple but robust
T
–
T
plot technique. Three different versions of the S-PASS data are considered, corresponding to: no correction for Faraday rotation; Faraday correction based on the rotation measure model presented by the S-PASS team; or Faraday correction based on a rotation measure model presented by Hutschenreuter and Enßlin. We find that the correlation between S-PASS and WMAP is strongest when applying the S-PASS model. Adopting this correction model, we find that the mean spectral index of polarized synchrotron emission gradually steepens from
β
s
≈ −2.8 at low Galactic latitudes to
β
s
≈ −3.3 at high Galactic latitudes, in good agreement with previously published results. The flat spectral index at the low Galactic latitudes is likely partly due to depolarization effects. Finally, we consider two special cases defined by the BICEP2 and SPIDER fields and obtain mean estimates of
β
BICEP2
= −3.22 ± 0.06 and
β
SPIDER
= −3.21 ± 0.03, respectively. Adopting the bandpass filtered WMAP 23 GHz sky map to only include angular scales between 2° and 10° as a spatial template, we constrain the root-mean-square synchrotron polarization amplitude to be less than 0.03
μ
K (0.009
μ
K) at 90 GHz (150 GHz) for the BICEP2 field, corresponding roughly to a tensor-to-scalar ratio of
r
≲ 0.02 (
r
≲ 0.005). Very similar constraints are obtained for the SPIDER field. A comparison with a similar analysis performed in the 23–33 GHz range suggests a flattening of about Δ
β
s
∼ 0.1 ± 0.2 from low to higher frequencies, but with no statistical significance due to high uncertainties.
We present tensor-to-scalar ratio forecasts for GreenPol, a hypothetical ground-based B -mode experiment aiming to survey the cleanest regions of the Northern Galactic Hemisphere at five frequencies ...between 10 and 44 GHz. Its primary science goal would be to measure large-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization fluctuations at multipoles ℓ ≲ 500, and thereby constrain the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio r . The observations for the suggested experiment would take place at the Summit Station (72 ° 34N, 38 ° 27W) on Greenland, at an altitude of 3216 m above sea level. For this paper we simulated various experimental setups, and derived limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio after CMB component separation using a Bayesian component separation implementation called Commander. When combining the proposed experiment with Planck HFI observations for constraining polarized thermal dust emission, we found a projected limit of r < 0.02 at 95% confidence for the baseline configuration. This limit is very robust with respect to a range of important experimental parameters, including sky coverage, detector weighting, foreground priors, among others. Overall, GreenPol would have the possibility to provide deep CMB polarization measurements of the Northern Galactic Hemisphere at low frequencies.
COSMOGLOBE DR1 results Watts, D. J.; Basyrov, A.; Eskilt, J. R. ...
Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin),
11/2023, Letnik:
679
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We present C
OSMOGLOBE
Data Release 1, which implements the first joint analysis of WMAP and
Planck
LFI time-ordered data, processed within a single Bayesian end-to-end framework. This framework ...directly builds on a similar analysis of the LFI measurements by the B
EYOND
P
LANCK
collaboration, and approaches the cosmic microwave background (CMB) analysis challenge through Gibbs sampling of a global posterior distribution, simultaneously accounting for calibration, mapmaking, and component separation. The computational cost of producing one complete WMAP+LFI Gibbs sample is 812 CPU-h, of which 603 CPU-h are spent on WMAP low-level processing; this demonstrates that end-to-end Bayesian analysis of the WMAP data is computationally feasible. We find that our WMAP posterior mean temperature sky maps and CMB temperature power spectrum are largely consistent with the official WMAP9 results. Perhaps the most notable difference is that our CMB dipole amplitude is 3366.2 ± 1.4 μK, which is 11 μK higher than the WMAP9 estimate and 2.5
σ
higher than B
EYOND
P
LANCK
; however, it is in perfect agreement with the HFI-dominated
Planck
PR4 result. In contrast, our WMAP polarization maps differ more notably from the WMAP9 results, and in general exhibit significantly lower large-scale residuals. We attribute this to a better constrained gain and transmission imbalance model. It is particularly noteworthy that the
W
-band polarization sky map, which was excluded from the official WMAP cosmological analysis, for the first time appears visually consistent with the
V
-band sky map. Similarly, the long standing discrepancy between the WMAP
K
-band and LFI 30 GHz maps is finally resolved, and the difference between the two maps appears consistent with instrumental noise at high Galactic latitudes. Relatedly, these updated maps allowed us for the first time to combine WMAP and LFI polarization data into a single coherent model of large-scale polarized synchrotron emission. Still, we identified a few issues that require additional work, including (1) low-level noise modeling; (2) large-scale temperature residuals at the 1–2 μK level; and (3) a strong degeneracy between the absolute
K
-band calibration and the dipole of the anomalous microwave emission component. We conclude that leveraging the complementary strengths of WMAP and LFI has allowed the mitigation of both experiments’ weaknesses, and resulted in new state-of-the-art WMAP sky maps. All maps and the associated code are made publicly available through the C
OSMOGLOBE
web page.
We review and compare two different cosmic microwave background (CMB) dipole estimators discussed in the literature and assess their performances through Monte Carlo simulations. The first method ...amounts to simple template regression with partial sky data, while the second method is an optimal Wiener filter (or Gibbs sampling) implementation. The main difference between the two methods is that the latter approach takes into account correlations with higher-order CMB temperature fluctuations that arise from nonorthogonal spherical harmonics on an incomplete sky, which for recent CMB data sets (such as
Planck
) is the dominant source of uncertainty. For an accepted sky fraction of 81% and an angular CMB power spectrum corresponding to the best-fit
Planck
2018 ΛCDM model, we find that the uncertainty on the recovered dipole amplitude is about six times smaller for the Wiener filter approach than for the template approach, corresponding to 0.5 and 3
μ
K, respectively. Similar relative differences are found for the corresponding directional parameters and other sky fractions. We note that the Wiener filter algorithm is generally applicable to any dipole estimation problem on an incomplete sky, as long as a statistical and computationally tractable model is available for the unmasked higher-order fluctuations. The methodology described in this paper forms the numerical basis for the most recent determination of the CMB solar dipole from
Planck
, as summarized by Planck Collaboration Int. LVII (2020).
COSMOGLOBE DR1 results Eskilt, J. R.; Watts, D. J.; Aurlien, R. ...
Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin),
11/2023, Letnik:
679
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Cosmic birefringence is a parity-violating effect that might have rotated the plane of the linearly polarized light of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by an angle
β
since its emission. This ...angle has recently been measured to be nonzero at a statistical significance of 3.6
σ
in the official
Planck
PR4 and 9-year WMAP data. In this work, we constrain
β
using the reprocessed B
EYOND
P
LANCK
LFI and C
OSMOGLOBE
DR1 WMAP polarization maps. These novel maps have both lower systematic residuals and a more complete error description than the corresponding official products. Foreground
EB
correlations could bias measurements of
β
, and while thermal dust
EB
emission has been argued to be statistically nonzero, no evidence for synchrotron
EB
power has been reported. Unlike the dust-dominated
Planck
HFI maps, the majority of the LFI and WMAP polarization maps are instead dominated by synchrotron emission. Simultaneously constraining
β
and the polarization miscalibration angle,
α
, of each channel, we find a best-fit value of
β
= 0.35° ±0.70° with LFI and WMAP data only. When including the
Planck
HFI PR4 maps, but fitting
β
separately for dust-dominated,
β
> 70 GHz
, and synchrotron-dominated channels,
β
≤70 GHz
, we find
β
≤70 GHz
= 0.53° ±0.28°. This differs from zero with a statistical significance of 1.9
σ
, and the main contribution to this value comes from the LFI 70 GHz channel. While the statistical significances of these results are low on their own, the measurement derived from the LFI and WMAP synchrotron-dominated maps agrees with the previously reported HFI-dominated constraints, despite the very different astrophysical and instrumental systematics involved in all these experiments.
We describe a simple but efficient method for deriving a consistent set of monopole and dipole corrections for multi-frequency sky map data sets, allowing robust parametric component separation with ...the same data set. The computational core of this method is linear regression between pairs of frequency maps, often called T−T plots. Individual contributions from monopole and dipole terms are determined by performing the regression locally in patches on the sky, while the degeneracy between different frequencies is lifted whenever the dominant foreground component exhibits a significant spatial spectral index variation. Based on this method, we present two different, but each internally consistent, sets of monopole and dipole coefficients for the nine-year WMAP, Planck 2013, SFD 100 μm, Haslam 408 MHz and Reich & Reich 1420 MHz maps. The two sets have been derived with different analysis assumptions and data selection, and provide an estimate of residual systematic uncertainties. In general, our values are in good agreement with previously published results. Among the most notable results are a relative dipole between the WMAP and Planck experiments of 10−15μK (depending on frequency), an estimate of the 408 MHz map monopole of 8.9 ± 1.3 K, and a non-zero dipole in the 1420 MHz map of 0.15 ± 0.03 K pointing towards Galactic coordinates (l,b) = (308°,−36°) ± 14°. These values represent the sum of any instrumental and data processing offsets, as well as any Galactic or extra-Galactic component that is spectrally uniform over the full sky.
We study four particularly bright polarized compact objects (Tau A, Vir A, 3C 273, and For A) in the 7 year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) sky maps, with the goal of understanding ...potential systematics involved in the estimation of foreground spectral indices. First, we estimate the spectral index, the polarization angle, the polarization fraction, and the apparent size and shape of these objects when smoothed to a nominal resolution of 1degrees FWHM. Second, we compute the spectral index as a function of polarization orientation, alpha . Because these objects are approximately point sources with constant polarization angle, this function should be constant in the absence of systematics. However, for the K and Ka band WMAP data we find strong index variations for all four sources. For Tau A, we find a spectral index of beta = -2.59 + or - 0.03 for alpha = 30degrees, and beta = -2.03 + or - 0.01 for alpha = 50degrees. On the other hand, the spectral index between the Ka and Q bands is found to be stable. A simple elliptical Gaussian toy model with parameters matching those observed in Tau A reproduces the observed signal, and shows that the spectral index is particularly sensitive to the detector polarization angle. Based on these findings, we first conclude that estimation of spectral indices with the WMAP K band polarization data at 1degrees scales is not robust. Second, we note that these issues may be of concern for ground-based and sub-orbital experiments that use the WMAP polarization measurements of Tau A for calibration of gain and polarization angles.
BEYONDPLANCK Svalheim, T. L.; Andersen, K. J.; Aurlien, R. ...
Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin),
06/2023, Letnik:
675
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Using the
Planck
Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) and WMAP data within the global Bayesian B
EYOND
P
LANCK
framework, we constrained the polarized foreground emission between 30 and 70 GHz. We ...combined, for the first time, full-resolution
Planck
LFI time-ordered data with low-resolution WMAP sky maps at 33, 40, and 61 GHz. The spectral parameters were fit with a likelihood defined at the native resolution of each frequency channel. This analysis represents the first implementation of true multi-resolution component separation applied to CMB observations for both amplitude and spectral energy distribution (SED) parameters. For the synchrotron emission, we approximated the SED as a power-law in frequency and we find that the low signal-to-noise ratio of the current data strongly limits the number of free parameters that can be robustly constrained. We partitioned the sky into four large disjoint regions (High Latitude; Galactic Spur; Galactic Plane; and Galactic Center), each associated with its own power-law index. We find that the High Latitude region is prior-dominated, while the Galactic Center region is contaminated by residual instrumental systematics. The two remaining regions appear to be signal-dominated, and for these we derive spectral indices of
β
s
Spur
= −3.17 ± 0.06 and β
s
Plane
= −3.03 ± 0.07, which is in good agreement with previous results. For the thermal dust emission, we assumed a modified blackbody model and we fit a single power-law index across the full sky. We find
β
d
= 1.64 ± 0.03, which is slightly steeper than the value reported in
Planck
HFI data, but still statistically consistent at the 2
σ
confidence level.
Abstract
LiteBIRD, the Lite (Light) satellite for the study of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection, is a space mission for primordial cosmology and ...fundamental physics. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) selected LiteBIRD in May 2019 as a strategic large-class (L-class) mission, with an expected launch in the late 2020s using JAXA’s H3 rocket. LiteBIRD is planned to orbit the Sun–Earth Lagrangian point L2, where it will map the cosmic microwave background polarization over the entire sky for three years, with three telescopes in 15 frequency bands between 34 and 448 GHz, to achieve an unprecedented total sensitivity of $2.2\, \mu$K-arcmin, with a typical angular resolution of 0.5○ at 100 GHz. The primary scientific objective of LiteBIRD is to search for the signal from cosmic inflation, either making a discovery or ruling out well-motivated inflationary models. The measurements of LiteBIRD will also provide us with insight into the quantum nature of gravity and other new physics beyond the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. We provide an overview of the LiteBIRD project, including scientific objectives, mission and system requirements, operation concept, spacecraft and payload module design, expected scientific outcomes, potential design extensions, and synergies with other projects.
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