Half-wave-plate non idealities propagated to component separated CMB B-modes
astro-ph.CO
Submitted: 2026-03-19
Updated: 2026-09-17
Comments: 22 pages, 19 figures. Version accepted for publication in PRD (June 2026)
Journal ref: Phys. Rev. D 114, 023543 (2026)
DOI: 10.1103/zdcy-8zyd
Code: https://github.com/CMBSciPol/furax
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We assess the impact of non-ideal, continuously rotating half-wave plates (HWPs) on cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization measurements targeting large angular scale signal.
Terminology
Abstract
We assess the impact of non-ideal, continuously rotating half-wave plates (HWPs) on cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization measurements targeting large angular scale signal. Such hardware solutions are used in or planned for multiple modern CMB efforts, both ground-based, for instance, small aperture telescopes of Simons Observatory or satellite borne, such as LiteBIRD. Using a frequency-dependent parametric model based on the Mueller matrix formalism, we characterize the induced mixing of Stokes parameters. Through end-to-end simulations, we propagate these effects from time-ordered data to cosmology via map-making and component-separation stages, quantifying their impact on the B-modes power spectrum and the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r. Our analysis shows that neglecting the frequency dependence of a three-layer HWP gives rise to significant polarization leakage, biases foreground spectral parameters, and leads to residual contamination in the recovered CMB maps. To mitigate these effects, we investigate multiple analysis strategies progressively incorporating a more complete description of the instrumental response. At the map-making level, this requires generalizing the standard pointing matrix to account for the full time- and frequency-dependent instrumental response. We find that standard HWP models, reduce the biases only down to r about 10-2, while a more advanced approach based on a generalization of both map-making and component separation, implemented using JAX, can suppress it down to r about 7 times 10-4. Finally, we extend this approach to a time-domain component-separation, enabling a statistically consistent treatment of instrumental response in the presence of time-domain features. We demonstrate its feasibility and validate it by performing a full end-to-end analysis, recovering results in good agreement with the map-based ones.
Sources
- Effect of Instrumental Polarization with a Half-Wave Plate on the $B$-Mode Signal: Prediction and Correction
- Studies of Systematic Uncertainties for Simons Observatory: Polarization Modulator Related Effects
- Making maps of Cosmic Microwave Background polarization for B-mode studies: the POLARBEAR example
- The Simons Observatory: Detector Polarization Angle Calibration using Sparse Wire Grid with Initial Data Sets of the Small Aperture Telescope
- Lineax: unified linear solves and linear least-squares in JAX and Equinox
- The Simons Observatory: Combining delensing and foreground cleaning for improved constraints on inflation
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