Status and future development of the COSMOCal Project for absolute CMB polarization calibration
摘要
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization measurements are pushing instrumental sensitivities to levels where calibration systematics become a dominant limitation. The large dynamic range between cosmological and Galactic emission prevents future experiments from relying only on diffuse sky measurements or standard celestial calibrators. To address this challenge, the COSmological Microwave Observations Calibrator (COSMOCal) project proposes an artificial calibration source deployed as a guest payload on a geostationary satellite, scheduled for launch by the Eutelsat group by 2030. This source will provide stable, well-characterized polarized microwave signals accessible to multiple ground-based observatories. In this work, we present the status of the project, the updated development timeline, and the refined scientific and technical requirements, defined with the observatories that plan to use this calibration source. Furthermore, we investigate the interplay between instrumental systematics and component separation in the presence of complex models of interstellar dust emission. We discuss in this paper how this can impact the recovery of the primordial signal, and whether residual calibration errors can degrade the performance of foreground cleaning algorithms.
引用
@article{arxiv.2607.12698,
title = {Status and future development of the COSMOCal Project for absolute CMB polarization calibration},
author = {Silvia Micheli and Alessia Ritacco and Alessandro Carones and Jonathan Aumont and Stefano Berta and Ludovico Bizzarri and François Boulanger and Andrea Catalano and Francesco Cuttaia and Anne Denis and François-Xavier Désert and Anne Laure Fontana and David González-Ovejero and Benedetta Kalemi and Nicoletta Krachmalnicoff and Samuel Leclercq and Thibaut Louis and Juan-Francisco Macías-Pérez and Bruno Maffei and Tania Mcnamara and Marina Migliaccio and Ludovic Montier and Pascal Morfin and Michel Moulin and Louise Mousset and Matteo Murgia and Ioannis Myserlis and Federico Nati and Pierluigi Ortu and Michel Pérault and Giampaolo Pisano and Tonino Pisanu and Nicolas Ponthieu and Sofia Savorgnano and Luca Terenzi and Jeanne Treuttel and Léo Vacher and Christophe Vescovi and Mario Zannoni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12698},
year = {2026}
}
备注
Submitted to Proceedings of SPIE, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2026. 12 pages, 3 figures