Observing CMB polarisation through ice

Abstract

Ice crystal clouds in the upper troposphere can generate polarisation signals at the uK level. This signal can seriously affect very sensitive ground based searches for E- and B-mode of Cosmic Microwave Background polarisation. In this paper we estimate this effect within the ClOVER experiment observing bands (97, 150 and 220 GHz) for the selected observing site (Llano de Chajnantor, Atacama desert, Chile). The results show that the polarisation signal from the clouds can be of the order of or even bigger than the CMB expected polarisation. Climatological data suggest that this signal is fairly constant over the whole year in Antarctica. On the other hand the stronger seasonal variability in Atacama allows for a 50% of clean observations during the dry season.

7 Pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• A Line of Sight Approach to Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies
• A CMB Polarization Primer
• Large Angular Scale Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Feasibility of its Detection
• First whole atmosphere night-time seeing measurements at Dome C, Antarctica
• Polarization of the Atmosphere as a Foreground for Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Experiments
• The Optical/Infrared Astronomical Quality of High Atacama Sites. I. Preliminary Results of Optical Seeing

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Measurements of tropospheric ice clouds with a ground-based CMB polarization experiment, POLARBEAR
• Two-year Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) Observations: A First Detection of Atmospheric Circular Polarization at Q Band
• A template of atmospheric O2 circularly polarized emission for CMB experiments
• Measurement and Modeling of Polarized Atmosphere at the South Pole with SPT-3G