No evidence for dust B -mode decorrelation in Planck data

Sheehy, Christopher; Slosar, Anze

doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.97.043522

No evidence for dust $B$ -mode decorrelation in Planck data

Journal Article · Mon Feb 19 23:00:00 EST 2018 · Physical Review D

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.043522· OSTI ID:1430840

Sheehy, Christopher ^[1]; Slosar, Anze ^[1]

Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States). Physics Dept.

Constraints on inflationary B modes using cosmic microwave background polarization data commonly rely on either template cleaning or cross-spectra between maps at different frequencies to disentangle Galactic foregrounds from the cosmological signal. Assumptions about how the foregrounds scale with frequency are therefore crucial to interpreting the data. Recent results from the Planck satellite collaboration claim significant evidence for a decorrelation in the polarization signal of the spatial pattern of Galactic dust between 217 and 353 GHz. Such a decorrelation would suppress power in the cross-spectrum between high-frequency maps, where the dust is strong, and lower-frequency maps, where the sensitivity to cosmological B modes is strongest. Alternatively, it would leave residuals in lower-frequency maps cleaned with a template derived from the higher-frequency maps. If not accounted for, both situations would result in an underestimate of the dust contribution and thus an upward bias on measurements of the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r. In this paper, we revisit this measurement and find that the no-decorrelation hypothesis cannot be excluded with the Planck data. There are three main reasons for this: (i) There is significant noise bias in cross-spectra between Planck data splits that needs to be accounted for. (ii) There is strong evidence for unknown instrumental systematics, the amplitude of which we estimate using alternative Planck data splits. (iii) There are significant correlations between measurements in different sky patches that need to be taken into account when assessing the statistical significance. Finally, between ℓ = 55-90 and over 72% of the sky, the dust BB correlation between 217 and 353 GHz is 1.001 ^+.004/.021_-.004/.000 (68% stat/syst.) and shows no significant trend with the sky fraction.

View Accepted Manuscript (DOE)

Research Organization:: Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE; BNL Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0012704

OSTI ID:: 1430840

Report Number(s):: BNL--203365-2018-JAAM

Journal Information:: Physical Review D, Journal Name: Physical Review D Journal Issue: 4 Vol. 97; ISSN 2470-0010

Publisher:: American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Cited By (4)

Statistical properties of polarized CMB foreground maps von Hausegger, Sebastian; Gammelgaard Ravnebjerg, Aske; Liu, Hao Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 487, Issue 4 https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz1582	journal	June 2019
Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves Using P l a n c k , WMAP, and New BICEP2/ K e c k Observations through the 2015 Season Ade, P. A. R.; Ahmed, Z.; Aikin, R. W. Physical Review Letters, Vol. 121, Issue 22 https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.121.221301	journal	November 2018
A Projected Estimate of the Reionization Optical Depth Using the CLASS Experiment’s Sample Variance Limited E-mode Measurement Watts, Duncan J.; Wang, Bingjie; Ali, Aamir The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 863, Issue 2 https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aad283	journal	August 2018
A New Probe of Line-of-sight Magnetic Field Tangling Clark, S. E. The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 857, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aabb54	journal	April 2018

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