We simulate a variety of optical systematics for Taurus, a balloon-borne cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarisation experiment, to assess their impact on large-scale E-mode polarisation measurements and constraints of the optical depth to reionisation {\tau}. We model a one-month flight of Taurus from Wanaka, New Zealand aboard a super-pressure balloon (SPB). We simulate night-time scans of both the CMB and dust foregrounds in the 150GHz band, one of Taurus's four observing bands. We consider a variety of possible systematics that may affect Taurus's observations, including non-gaussian beams, pointing reconstruction error, and half-wave plate (HWP) non-idealities. For each of these, we evaluate the residual power in the difference between maps simulated with and without the systematic, and compare this to the expected signal level corresponding to Taurus's science goals. Our results indicate that most of the HWP-related systematics can be mitigated to be smaller than sample variance by calibrating with Planck's TT spectrum and using an achromatic HWP model, with a preference for five layers of sapphire to ensure good systematic control. However, additional beam characterization will be required to mitigate far-sidelobe pickup from dust on larger scales.
@article{arxiv.2406.11992,
title = {Modeling optical systematics for the Taurus CMB experiment},
author = {Alexandre E. Adler and Jason E. Austermann and Steven J. Benton and Shannon M. Duff and Jeffrey P. Filippini and Aurelien A. Fraisse and Thomas Gascard and Sho M. Gibbs and Suren Gourapura and Johannes Hubmayr and Jon E. Gudmundsson and William C. Jones and Jared L. May and Johanna M. Nagy and Kate Okun and Ivan Padilla and Christopher Rooney and Simon Tartakovsky and Michael R. Vissers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.11992},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
21 pages, 6 tables, 7 figures, this version as published in JCAP after minor revisions to v1