Cosmic microwave background polarization analysis

Abstract

With polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now detected, and confirmed by several independent experiments, the next goal is to characterise accurately its statistical properties. In these lecture notes we review the physical motivation for pursuing CMB polarization, and the basic statistical properties of the polarization fields. We then discuss some of the key aspects of the analysis of CMB polarization data, focusing on the additional complications that arise compared to temperature data due to the tensor character of the polarization field.

Summer school lecture notes. To appear in `Data analysis in cosmology' (Springer LNP), Valencia, 6-10 September 2004

References in corpus (17)

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Effects of a Primordial Magnetic Field on Low and High Multipoles of the CMB
• The Search for a Primordial Magnetic Field
• Primordial Magnetic Field Effects on the CMB and Large Scale Structure
• Probing the statistical properties of CMB $B$-mode polarization through Minkowski Functionals
• Constraints on the neutrino mass and the primordial magnetic field from the matter density fluctuation parameter ${\sigma }_8$
• A linear filter to reconstruct the ISW effect from CMB and LSS observations
• Causality and Primordial Tensor Modes
• An Observational Test of Holographic Inflation
• Effects of a primordial magnetic field with log-normal distribution on the cosmic microwave background
• What do we learn from CMB observations
• Constraints on the multi-lognormal magnetic fields from the observations of the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum
• Constraints on the cosmological parameters from BICEP2, Planck and WMAP
• Probing the primordial Universe from the low-multipole CMB data