English

Methods for pixel domain correction of EB leakage

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2019-07-31 v2

Abstract

In observation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization, "EBEB~leakage" refers to the artificial BB-mode signal coming from the leakage of EE-mode signal when part of the sky is unavailable or excluded. Correction of such leakage is one of the preconditions for detecting primordial gravitational waves via the CMB BB-mode signal. In this work, we design two independent methods for correcting the EBEB~leakage directly in the pixel domain using standard definitions of the EE- and BB-modes. The two methods give consistent results, and both are fast and easy to implement. Tests on a CMB simulation containing zero initial BB-mode show an efficient suppression of the EBEB leakage. When combined with the MASTER method to reconstruct the full-sky BB-mode spectrum in simulations with a relatively simple mask, the error from EB-leakage is suppressed further by more than one order of magnitude at the recombination bump, and up to three orders of magnitude at higher multipoles, compared to a "pure" MASTER scheme under the same conditions. Meanwhile, although the final power spectrum estimation benefits from apodization, the pixel domain correction itself is done without apodization, and thus the methods offer more freedom in choosing an apodization based on specific requirements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.04691,
  title  = {Methods for pixel domain correction of EB leakage},
  author = {Hao Liu and James Creswell and Sebastian von Hausegger and Pavel Naselsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.04691},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Add noises to simulations, move some technical descriptions to appendix. Accepted for publication in PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:12:31.167Z