Microwave Emission from Aligned Dust

Abstract

Polarized microwave emission from dust is an important foreground that may contaminate polarized CMB studies unless carefully accounted for. We discuss potential difficulties associated with this foreground, namely, the existence of different grain populations with very different emission/polarization properties and variations of the polarization yield with grain temperature. In particular, we discuss observational evidence in favor of rotational emission from tiny PAH particles with dipole moments, i.e. ``spinning dust'', and also consider magneto-dipole emission from strongly magnetized grains. We argue that in terms of polarization, the magneto-dipole emission may dominate even if its contribution to total emissivity is subdominant. Addressing polarized emission at frequencies larger than approsimately 100 GHz, we discuss the complications arising from the existence of dust components with different temperatures and possibly different alignment properties.

20 pages, 3 figures, to be published in the proceedings of "The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Polarization", New Astronomy Reviews, (eds. S. Hanany and K.A. Olive)

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Tracing Magnetic Fields with Aligned Grains
• Planck pre-launch status: the Planck-LFI programme
• Considerations in optimizing CMB polarization experiments to constrain inflationary physics
• Grain Alignment by Radiation in Dark Clouds and Cores
• SPIDER: Probing the Early Universe with a Suborbital Polarimeter
• Spinning Dust Emission: Effects of irregular grain shape, transient heating and comparison with WMAP results
• Measuring the tensor to scalar ratio from CMB B-modes in presence of foregrounds
• Galactic foreground contributions to the WMAP5 maps
• Physical Model of Dust Polarization by Radiative Torque Alignment and Disruption and Implications for Grain Internal Structures
• CBI limits on 31 GHz excess emission in southern HII regions
• Detectability of tensor modes in the presence of foregrounds
• 90GHz and 150GHz observations of the Orion M42 region. A sub-millimeter to radio analysis
• Galactic foregrounds: Spatial fluctuations and a procedure of removal
• Producing Synthetic Maps of Dust Polarization using Velocity Channel Gradient Technique
• A Technique for Foreground Subtraction in Redshifted 21 cm Observations
• Acceleration of small astrophysical grains due to charge fluctuations
• Acceleration of Small Dust Grains due to Charge Fluctuations
• Spinning Dust Emission from Wobbling Grains: Important Physical Effects and Implications
• The spectral energy distribution of the Carina nebula from far infrared to radio wavelengths
• SpyDust: an improved and extended implementation for modeling spinning dust radiation