Forecasting ground-based sensitivity to the Rayleigh scattering of the CMB in the presence of astrophysical foregrounds

Abstract

The Rayleigh scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons off the neutral hydrogen produced during recombination effectively creates an additional scattering surface after recombination that encodes new cosmological information, including the expansion and ionization history of the universe. A first detection of Rayleigh scattering is a tantalizing target for next-generation CMB experiments. We have developed a Rayleigh scattering forecasting pipeline that includes instrumental effects, atmospheric noise, and astrophysical foregrounds (e.g., Galactic dust, cosmic infrared background, or CIB, and the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect). We forecast the Rayleigh scattering detection significance for several upcoming ground-based experiments, including SPT-3G+, Simons Observatory, CCAT-prime, and CMB-S4, and examine the limitations from atmospheric and astrophysical foregrounds as well as potential mitigation strategies. When combined with Planck data, we estimate that the ground-based experiments will detect Rayleigh scattering with a significance between 1.6 and 3.7, primarily limited by atmospheric noise and the CIB.

arXiv comment19 pages, 7 figures (v2 additional author added)

References in corpus (26)

• Planck 2018 results. I. Overview and the cosmological legacy of Planck
• The Simons Observatory: Science goals and forecasts
• Modelling the infrared galaxy evolution using a phenomenological approach
• CMB-S4: Forecasting Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves
• The Python Sky Model: software for simulating the Galactic microwave sky
• The pre-launch Planck Sky Model: a model of sky emission at submillimetre to centimetre wavelengths
• A measurement of secondary cosmic microwave background anisotropies from the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ survey
• Planck 2018 results. XI. Polarized dust foregrounds
• Extragalactic millimeter-wave point source catalog, number counts and statistics from 771 square degrees of the SPT-SZ Survey
• A hybrid model for the evolution of galaxies and Active Galactic Nuclei in the infrared
• Improved Models for Cosmic Infrared Background Anisotropies: New Constraints on the IR Galaxy Population
• The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Infrared Experiment: A Millimeter-wave Receiver for Cluster Cosmology
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Two-season ACTPol Extragalactic Point Sources and their Polarization properties
• Year two instrument status of the SPT-3G cosmic microwave background receiver
• Sensitivity of the Prime-Cam Instrument on the CCAT-prime Telescope
• Constraining Cluster Virialization Mechanism and Cosmology using Thermal-SZ-selected clusters from Future CMB Surveys
• Rayleigh Scattering and Microwave Background Fluctuations
• Fractional Polarisation of Extragalactic Sources in the 500-square-degree SPTpol Survey
• Rayleigh scattering: blue sky thinking for future CMB observations
• Rayleigh Scattering Cross Section Redward of Ly$\alpha$ by Atomic Hydrogen
• Extracting foreground-obscured $\mu$-distortion anisotropies to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity
• The Effects of Rayleigh Scattering on the CMB and Cosmic Structure
• Measurements of the Cross Spectra of the Cosmic Infrared and Microwave Backgrounds from 95 to 1200 GHz
• Cosmology with Rayleigh Scattering of the Cosmic Microwave Background
• The primordial information content of Rayleigh Anisotropies
• The Python Sky Model 3 software