We demonstrate that for a cosmic variance limited experiment, CMB E polarization alone places stronger constraints on cosmological parameters than CMB temperature. For example, we show that EE can constrain parameters better than TT by up to a factor 2.8 when a multipole range of l=30-2500 is considered. We expose the physical effects at play behind this remarkable result and study how it depends on the multipole range included in the analysis. In most relevant cases, TE or EE surpass the TT based cosmological constraints. This result is important as the small scale astrophysical foregrounds are expected to have a much reduced impact on polarization, thus opening the possibility of building cleaner and more stringent constraints of the LCDM model. This is relevant specially for proposed future CMB satellite missions, such as CORE or PRISM, that are designed to be cosmic variance limited in polarization till very large multipoles. We perform the same analysis for a Planck-like experiment, and conclude that even in this case TE alone should determine the constraint on Ωch2 better than TT by 15%, while determining Ωbh2, ns and θ with comparable accuracy. Finally, we explore a few classical extensions of the LCDM model and show again that CMB polarization alone provides more stringent constraints than CMB temperature in case of a cosmic variance limited experiment.
@article{arxiv.1403.5271,
title = {CMB Polarization can constrain cosmology better than CMB temperature},
author = {Silvia Galli and Karim Benabed and François Bouchet and Jean-François Cardoso and Franz Elsner and Eric Hivon and Anna Mangilli and Simon Prunet and Benjamin Wandelt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.5271},
year = {2015}
}