Breaking the degeneracy between polarization efficiency and cosmological parameters in CMB experiments

Abstract

Accurate cosmological parameter estimates using polarization data of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) put stringent requirements on map calibration, as highlighted in the recent results from the Planck satellite. In this paper, we point out that a model-dependent determination of polarization calibration can be achieved by the joint fit of the TE and EE CMB power spectra. This provides a valuable cross-check to band-averaged polarization efficiency measurements determined using other approaches. We demonstrate that, in $\Lambda$CDM, the combination of the TE and EE constrain polarization calibration with sub-percent uncertainty with Planck data and 2% uncertainty with SPTpol data. We arrive at similar conclusions when extending $\Lambda$CDM to include the amplitude of lensing $A_{\mathrm{L}}$, the number of relativistic species $N_{\mathrm{eff}}$, or the sum of the neutrino masses $\sum m_{\nu }$. The uncertainties on cosmological parameters are minimally impacted when marginalizing over polarization calibration, except, as can be expected, for the uncertainty on the amplitude of the primordial scalar power spectrum $\ln (10^{10}{A}_{\mathrm{s}})$, which increases by $20-50$%. However, this information can be fully recovered by adding TT data. For current and future ground-based experiments, SPT-3G and CMB-S4, we forecast the cosmological parameter uncertainties to be minimally degraded when marginalizing over polarization calibration parameters. In addition, CMB-S4 could constrain its polarization calibration at the level of $\sim$0.2% by combining TE and EE, and reach $\sim$0.06% by also including TT. We therefore conclude that relying on calibrating against Planck polarization maps, whose statistical uncertainty is limited to $\sim$0.5%, would be insufficient for upcoming experiments.

11 pages, 8 figures. Comments welcome

References in corpus (8)

• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR4 Maps and Cosmological Parameters
• SPT-3G: A Next-Generation Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Experiment on the South Pole Telescope
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz
• Cosmic Microwave Weak lensing data as a test for the dark universe
• CMB Polarization can constrain cosmology better than CMB temperature
• POLOCALC: a Novel Method to Measure the Absolute Polarization Orientation of the Cosmic Microwave Background
• POLARBEAR-2: an instrument for CMB polarization measurements
• Optical modeling and polarization calibration for CMB measurements with ACTPol and Advanced ACTPol

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• Hints of Early Dark Energy in Planck, SPT, and ACT data: new physics or systematics?
• SPT-3G D1: CMB temperature and polarization power spectra and cosmology from 2019 and 2020 observations of the SPT-3G Main field
• Constraints on cosmic birefringence using $E$-mode polarisation