Abstract
We demonstrate that, for the baseline design of the CORE satellite mission, the polarized foregrounds can be controlled at the level required to allow the detection of the primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization with the desired accuracy at both reionization and recombination scales, for tensor-to-scalar ratio values of r 5× 10-3. We consider detailed sky simulations based on state-of-the-art CMB observations that consist of CMB polarization with τ=0.055 and tensor-to-scalar values ranging from r=10-2 to 10-3, Galactic synchrotron, and thermal dust polarization with variable spectral indices over the sky, polarized anomalous microwave emission, polarized infrared and radio sources, and gravitational lensing effects. Using both parametric and blind approaches, we perform full component separation and likelihood analysis of the simulations, allowing us to quantify both uncertainties and biases on the reconstructed primordial B-modes. Under the assumption of perfect control of lensing effects, CORE would measure an unbiased estimate of r=(5 ± 0.4)× 10-3 after foreground cleaning. In the presence of both gravitational lensing effects and astrophysical foregrounds, the significance of the detection is lowered, with CORE achieving a 4σ-measurement of r=5× 10-3 after foreground cleaning and 60% delensing. For lower tensor-to-scalar ratios (r=10-3) the overall uncertainty on r is dominated by foreground residuals, not by the 40% residual of lensing cosmic variance. Moreover, the residual contribution of unprocessed polarized point-sources can be the dominant foreground contamination to primordial B-modes at this r level, even on relatively large angular scales, ℓ ∼ 50. Finally, we report two sources of potential bias for the detection of the primordial B-modes by future CMB experiments: (i) the use of incorrect foreground models, e.g. a modelling error of Δβs = 0.02 on the synchrotron spectral indices may result in an excess in the recovered reionization peak corresponding to an effective Δ r > 10-3; (ii) the average of the foreground line-of-sight spectral indices by the combined effects of pixelization and beam convolution, which adds an effective curvature to the foreground spectral energy distribution and may cause spectral degeneracies with the CMB in the frequency range probed by the experiment.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 023 |
| Journal | Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics |
| Volume | 2018 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 5 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The research leading to these results has received funding from the ERC Starting Consolidator Grant (no. 307209). Some of the results in this paper have been derived using the HEALPix package [69]. We acknowledge the use of the PSM package [42], developed by the Planck working group on component separation, for making the simulations used in this work. We acknowledge the use of the Ulysses cluster at SISSA. This research was partially
Funding Information:
supported by the RADIOFOREGROUNDS project, funded by the European Commission’s H2020 Research Infrastructures under the Grant Agreement 687312, and the INDARK INFN Initiative. GDZ acknowledges support by ASI/INAF agreement no. 2014-024-R.1. R.F.-C., E.M.-G., and P.V. acknowledge support from the Spanish MINECO project ESP2015-70646-C2-1-R (cofinanced with EU FEDER funds), Consolider-Ingenio 2010 project CSD2010-00064 and from the CSIC “Proyecto Intramural Especial” project 201550E091. JGN acknowledges financial support from the Spanish MINECO for a ‘Ramon y Cajal’ fellowship (RYC-2013-13256) and the I+D 2015 project AYA2015-65887-P (MINECO/FEDER). CJM is supported by an FCT Research Professorship, contract reference IF/00064/2012, funded by FCT/MCTES (Portugal) and POPH/FSE.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab.
Keywords
- CMBR experiments
- cosmological parameters from CMBR
- gravitational waves and CMBR polarization
- inflation