We search for the signature of parity-violating physics in the cosmic microwave background, called cosmic birefringence, using the Planck data release 4. We initially find a birefringence angle of ...β=0.30°±0.11° (68% C.L.) for nearly full-sky data. The values of β decrease as we enlarge the Galactic mask, which can be interpreted as the effect of polarized foreground emission. Two independent ways to model this effect are used to mitigate the systematic impact on β for different sky fractions. We choose not to assign cosmological significance to the measured value of β until we improve our knowledge of the foreground polarization.
We present constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio
r
using
Planck
data. We use the latest release of
Planck
maps, processed with the
NPIPE
code, which produces calibrated frequency maps in ...temperature and polarisation for all
Planck
channels from 30 GHz to 857 GHz using the same pipeline. We computed constraints on
r
using the
BB
angular power spectrum, and we also discuss constraints coming from the
TT
spectrum. Given
Planck
’s noise level, the
TT
spectrum gives constraints on
r
that are cosmic-variance limited (with
σ
r
= 0.093), but we show that the marginalised posterior peaks towards negative values of
r
at about the 1.2
σ
level. We derived
Planck
constraints using the
BB
power spectrum at both large angular scales (the ‘reionisation bump’) and intermediate angular scales (the ‘recombination bump’) from
ℓ
= 2 to 150 and find a stronger constraint than that from
TT
, with
σ
r
= 0.069. The
Planck
BB
spectrum shows no systematic bias and is compatible with zero, given both the statistical noise and the systematic uncertainties. The likelihood analysis using
B
modes yields the constraint
r
< 0.158 at 95% confidence using more than 50% of the sky. This upper limit tightens to
r
< 0.069 when
Planck
EE
,
BB
, and
EB
power spectra are combined consistently, and it tightens further to
r
< 0.056 when the
Planck
TT
power spectrum is included in the combination. Finally, combining
Planck
with BICEP2/Keck 2015 data yields an upper limit of
r
< 0.044.
We present constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio r using a combination of BICEP/Keck 2018 (BK18) and Planck PR4 data allowing us to fit for r consistently with the six parameters of the ΛCDM ...model. We discuss the sensitivity of constraints on r to uncertainties in the ΛCDM parameters as defined by the Planck data. In particular, we are able to derive a constraint on the reionization optical depth τ and thus propagate its uncertainty into the posterior distribution for r. While Planck sensitivity to r is slightly lower than the current ground-based measurements, the combination of Planck with BK18 and baryon-acoustic-oscillation data yields results consistent with r=0 and tightens the constraint to r<0.032 at 95% confidence.
ABSTRACT
Taking advantage of the reduced levels of noise and systematics in the data of the latest Planck release (PR4, also known as NPIPE), we construct a new all-sky Compton-y parameter map ...(hereafter, y-map) of the thermal Sunyaev–Zeldovich (SZ) effect from the Planck PR4 data. A tailored Needlet Internal Linear Combination (NILC) pipeline, first validated on detailed sky simulations, is applied to the nine single-frequency Planck PR4 sky maps, ranging from 30 to 857 GHz, to produce the PR4 y-map over 98 per cent of the sky. Using map comparisons, angular power spectra, and one-point statistics, we show that the PR4 NILC y-map is of improved quality compared to that of the previous PR2 release. The new y-map shows reduced levels of large-scale striations associated with 1/f noise in the scan direction. Regions near the Galactic plane also show lower residual contamination by Galactic thermal dust emission. At small angular scales, the residual contamination by thermal noise and cosmic infrared background (CIB) emission is found to be reduced by around 7 and 34 per cent, respectively, in the PR4 y-map. The PR4 NILC y-map is made publicly available for astrophysical and cosmological analyses of the thermal SZ effect.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation data obtained by different experiments contain, besides the desired signal, a superposition of microwave sky contributions. Using a wavelet ...decomposition on the sphere, we present a fast and robust method to recover the CMB signal from microwave maps. We present an application to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) polarization data, which shows its good performance, particularly in very polluted regions of the sky. The applied wavelet has the advantages that it requires little computational time in its calculations, it is adapted to the healpix pixelization scheme and it offers the possibility of multiresolution analysis. The decomposition is implemented as part of a fully internal template fitting method, minimizing the variance of the resulting map at each scale. Using a χ2 characterization of the noise, we find that the residuals of the cleaned maps are compatible with those expected from the instrumental noise. The maps are also comparable to those obtained from the WMAP team, but in our case we do not make use of external data sets. In addition, at low resolution, our cleaned maps present a lower level of noise. The E-mode power spectrum
is computed at high and low resolutions, and a cross-power spectrum
is also calculated from the foreground reduced maps of temperature given by WMAP and our cleaned maps of polarization at high resolution. These spectra are consistent with the power spectra supplied by the WMAP team. We detect the E-mode acoustic peak at ℓ∼ 400, as predicted by the standard ΛCDM model. The B-mode power spectrum
is compatible with zero.
In this paper, we present Q-U-I JOint Tenerife Experiment (QUIJOTE) 10–20 GHz observations (194 h in total over ≈250 deg2) in intensity and polarisation of G159.6-18.5, one of the most widely studied ...regions harbouring anomalous microwave emission (AME). By combining with other publicly available intensity data, we achieve the most precise spectrum of the AME measured to date in an individual region, with 13 independent data points between 10 and 50 GHz being dominated by this emission. The four QUIJOTE data points provide the first independent confirmation of the downturn of the AME spectrum at low frequencies, initially unveiled by the COSMOlogical Structures On Medium Angular Scales experiment in this region. Our polarisation maps, which have an angular resolution of ≈1° and a sensitivity of ≈ 25 μK beam−1, are consistent with zero polarisation. We obtain upper limits on the polarisation fraction of Π < 6.3 and <2.8 per cent (95 per cent C.L.), respectively, at 12 and 18 GHz (ΠAME < 10.1 and <3.4 per cent with respect to the residual AME intensity), a frequency range where no AME polarisation observations have been reported to date. The combination of these constraints with those from other experiments confirm that all the magnetic dust models based on single-domain grains, and most of those considering randomly oriented magnetic inclusions, predict higher polarisation levels than is observed towards regions with AME. Also, neither of the two considered models of electric dipole emission seems to be compatible with all the observations together. More stringent constraints of the AME polarisation at 10–40 GHz are necessary to disentangle between different models, to which future QUIJOTE data will contribute.
A non-Gaussian detection in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) first-year data is reported. The detection has been found in the combined Q-V-W map proposed by the WMAP team after ...applying a wavelet technique based on the spherical Mexican hat wavelet (SMHW). The skewness and the kurtosis of the SMHW coefficients are calculated at different scales (ranging from a few arcminutes to tens of degrees). A non-Gaussian signal is detected at scales of the SMHW around 4 super(j0) (size in the sky of around 10 super(j0)). The right-tail probability of the detection is ~0.4%. In addition, a study of Gaussianity is performed in each hemisphere. The northern hemisphere is compatible with Gaussianity, whereas the southern one deviates from Gaussianity with a right-tail probability of ~0.1%. Systematics, foregrounds, and uncertainties in the estimation of the cosmological parameters are carefully studied in order to identify the possible source of non-Gaussianity. The detected deviation from Gaussianity is not found to be caused by systematic effects: (1) Each one of the Q, V, and W receivers shows the same non- Gaussianity pattern. (2) Several combinations of the different receivers at each frequency band-which highly reduce the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the foreground emissions-do not show this non-Gaussian pattern. Similarly, Galactic foregrounds show a negligible contribution to the non-Gaussian detection: non- Gaussianity is detected in all the WMAP maps (from 23 to 94 GHz), and no frequency dependence is observed. Moreover, the expected foreground contribution to the combined WMAP map was added to CMB Gaussian simulations showing a behavior compatible with the Gaussian model. The influence of uncertainties in the CMB power spectrum estimation are also quantified. Hence, possible intrinsic temperature fluctuations (such as secondary anisotropies and primordial features) cannot be rejected as the source of this non-Gaussian detection. We remark that our result implies not only asymmetries north/south-like other previous WMAP analyses-but also a direct non-Gaussian detection.
PDF
