E and B families of the Stokes parameters in the polarized synchrotron and thermal dust foregrounds

Abstract

Better understanding of Galactic foregrounds is one of the main obstacles to detection of primordial gravitational waves through measurement of the B mode in the polarized microwave sky. We generalize the method proposed in \cite{2011PhRvD..83h3003B} and decompose the polarization signals into the E and B families directly in the domain of the Stokes $Q$, $U$ parameters as $(Q,U)\equiv (Q_E,U_E)+(Q_B,U_B)$. This also enables an investigation of the morphology and the frequency dependence of these two families, which has been done in the WMAP K, Ka (tracing synchrotron emission) and Planck 2015 HFI maps (tracing thermal dust). The results reveal significant differences in spectra between the E and B families. The spectral index of the E family fluctuates less across the sky than that of the B family, and the same tendency occurs for the polarization angles of the dust and synchrotron channels. The new insight from WMAP and Planck data on the North Polar Spur and BICEP2 zones through our method clearly indicates that these zones are characterized by very low polarization intensity of the B family compared to the E family. We have detected global structure of the B family polarization angles at high Galactic latitudes which cannot be attributed to the cosmic microwave background or instrumental noise. However, we cannot exclude instrumental systematics as a partial contributor to these anomalies.

Correct some misprints in Section 2.3

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Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Morphological Analysis of the Polarized Synchrotron Emission with WMAP and Planck
• Real-space computation of $E$/$B$-mode maps I: Formalism, Compact Kernels, and Polarized Filaments
• Fingerprint of Galactic Loop I on polarized microwave foregrounds
• Statistical properties of polarized CMB foreground maps
• Statistics of non-polarized points in the CMB polarization maps
• The C-Band All-Sky Survey (C-BASS): Simulated parametric fitting in single pixels in total intensity and polarization
• From top-hat masking to smooth transitions: P-filter and its application to polarized microwave sky maps