Separating E from B

Abstract

In a microwave background polarization map that covers only part of the sky, it is impossible to separate the E and B components perfectly. This difficulty in general makes it more difficult to detect the B component in a data set. Any polarization map can be separated in a unique way into "pure E," "pure B," and "ambiguous" components. Power that resides in the pure E (B) component is guaranteed to be produced by E (B) modes, but there is no way to tell whether the ambiguous component comes from E or B modes. A polarization map can be separated into the three components either by finding an orthonormal basis for each component, or directly in real space by using Green functions or other methods.

To be published in the proceedings of "The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Polarization", New Astronomy Reviews, (eds. S. Hanany and K.A. Olive)

References in corpus (4)

• Detection of Polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background using DASI
• E/B decomposition of finite pixelized CMB maps
• Measuring Polarization with DASI
• The Optical Design and Characterization of the Microwave Anisotropy Probe

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Hybrid Estimation of CMB Polarization Power Spectra
• E- and B-mode mixing from incomplete knowledge of the shear correlation
• Full-sky ray-tracing simulation of weak lensing using ELUCID simulations: exploring galaxy intrinsic alignment and cosmic shear correlations
• Methods for pixel domain correction of EB leakage
• Quadratic estimator for CMB cross-correlation
• Efficient decomposition of cosmic microwave background polarization maps into pure E, pure B, and ambiguous components
• Fourier Band-Power E/B-mode Estimators for Cosmic Shear
• Blind correction of the EB-leakage in the pixel domain
• Bayesian Inference of Polarized CMB Power Spectra from Interferometric Data