English

Statistical imprints of CMB B-type polarization leakage in an incomplete sky survey analysis

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2017-01-25 v1

Abstract

One of the main goals of modern cosmology is to search for primordial gravitational waves by looking on their imprints in the B-type polarization in the cosmic microwave background radiation. However, this signal is contaminated by various sources, including cosmic weak lensing, foreground radiations, instrumental noises, as well as the E-to-B leakage caused by the partial sky surveys, which should be well understood to avoid the misinterpretation of the observed data. In this paper, we adopt the E/B decomposition method suggested by Smith in 2006, and study the imprints of E-to-B leakage residuals in the constructed B-type polarization maps, B(n^)\mathcal{B}(\hat{n}), by employing various statistical tools. We find that the effects of E-to-B leakage are negligible for the B\mathcal{B}-mode power spectrum, as well as the skewness and kurtosis analyses of B\mathcal{B}-maps. However, if employing the morphological statistical tools, including Minkowski functionals and/or Betti numbers, we find the effect of leakage can be detected at very high confidence level, which shows that in the morphological analysis, the leakage can play a significant role as a contaminant for measuring the primordial B-mode signal and must be taken into account for a correct explanation of the data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.03564,
  title  = {Statistical imprints of CMB B-type polarization leakage in an incomplete sky survey analysis},
  author = {Larissa Santos and Kai Wang and Yangrui Hu and Wenjuan Fang and Wen Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.03564},
  year   = {2017}
}