QuickPol: Fast calculation of effective beam matrices for CMB polarization

Abstract

Current and planned observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization anisotropies, with their ever increasing number of detectors, have reached a potential accuracy that requires a very demanding control of systematic effects. While some of these systematics can be reduced in the design of the instruments, others will have to be modeled and hopefully accounted for or corrected a posteriori. We propose QuickPol, a quick and accurate calculation of the full effective beam transfer function and of temperature to polarization leakage at the power spectra level, as induced by beam imperfections and mismatches between detector optical and electronic responses. All the observation details such as exact scanning strategy, imperfect polarization measurements, and flagged samples are accounted for. Our results are validated on Planck high frequency instrument (HFI) simulations. We show how the pipeline can be used to propagate instrumental uncertainties up to the final science products, and could be applied to experiments with rotating half-wave plates.

22 pages, 5 figures; edited for typos, style and updated references; matches the version to be published in A&A

References in corpus (13)

• Three Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Polarization Analysis
• Three-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Temperature Analysis
• Detection of Gravitational Lensing in the Cosmic Microwave Background
• CMB Polarization Systematics Due to Beam Asymmetry: Impact on Inflationary Science
• Asymmetric Beams and CMB Statistical Anisotropy
• Systematic errors in cosmic microwave background polarization measurements
• Polarized CMB power spectrum estimation using the pure pseudo-cross-spectrum approach
• CMB Polarization Systematics Due to Beam Asymmetry: Impact on Cosmological Birefringence
• CMB Beam Systematics: Impact on Lensing Parameter Estimation
• CMB power spectrum estimation using noncircular beams
• PReBeaM for Planck: A Polarized Regularized Beam Deconvolution Map-Making Method
• CMB power spectrum estimation with non-circular beam and incomplete sky coverage
• The CMB Derivatives of Planck's Beam Asymmetry

Cited by in corpus (3)

• New Extraction of the Cosmic Birefringence from the Planck 2018 Polarization Data
• Cosmic Birefringence from Planck Data Release 4
• Probing frequency-dependent half-wave plate systematics for CMB experiments with full-sky beam convolution simulations