BeyondPlanck XVI. Limits on Large-Scale Polarized Anomalous Microwave Emission from Planck LFI and WMAP

Abstract

We constrain the level of polarized anomalous microwave emission (AME) on large angular scales using $\text{Planck}$ LFI and $\text{WMAP}$ polarization data within a Bayesian CMB analysis framework. We model synchrotron emission with a power-law spectral energy distribution, and the sum of AME and thermal dust emission through linear regression with the $\text{Planck}$ HFI 353 GHz data. This template-based dust emission model allows us to constrain the level of polarized AME while making minimal assumptions on its frequency dependence. We neglect cosmic microwave background fluctuations, but show through simulations that these have a minor impact on the results. We find that the resulting AME polarization fraction confidence limit is sensitive to the polarized synchrotron spectral index prior, and for priors steeper than ${\beta }_{\mathrm{s}}=-3.1\pm 0.1$ we find an upper limit of $p_{\mathrm{AME}}^{\max }\lesssim 0.6\%$ ($95\%$ confidence). In contrast, for ${\beta }_{\mathrm{s}}=-3.0\pm 0.1$, we find a nominal detection of $p_{\mathrm{AME}}=2.5\pm 1.0\%$ ($95\%$ confidence). These data are thus not strong enough to simultaneously and robustly constrain both polarized synchrotron emission and AME, and our main result is therefore a constraint on the AME polarization fraction explicitly as a function of ${\beta }_{\mathrm{s}}$. Combining the current $\text{Planck}$ and $\text{WMAP}$ observations with measurements from high-sensitivity low-frequency experiments such as C-BASS and QUIJOTE will be critical to improve these limits further.

10 pages, 9 figures, part 15 of the BeyondPlanck release. All BeyondPlanck products and software will be released publicly at http://beyondplanck.science. Refereed, edited, and accepted by A&A. Added references, added arxiv IDs to BeyondPlanck papers. Figure update. Expanded discussion on AME models. Moved title from BeyondPlanck XV to BeyondPlanck XVI due to internal reordering

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Full-sky Models of Galactic Microwave Emission and Polarization at Sub-arcminute Scales for the Python Sky Model
• Optimization of foreground moment deprojection for semi-blind CMB polarization reconstruction
• QUIJOTE Scientific Results -- XVII. Studying the Anomalous Microwave Emission in the Andromeda Galaxy with QUIJOTE-MFI
• QUIJOTE scientific results -- XVIII. New constraints on the polarization of the Anomalous Microwave Emission in bright Galactic regions: $\rho$\,Ophiuchi, Perseus and W43
• Design and Performance of 30/40 GHz Diplexed Focal Plane for BICEP Array