Characterising cosmic birefringence in the presence of galactic foregrounds and instrumental systematic effects

Abstract

We study a possibility of constraining isotropic cosmic birefringence with help of cosmic microwave background polarisation data in the presence of polarisation angle miscalibration without relying on any assumptions about the Galactic foreground angular power spectra and in particular on their EB correlation. We propose a new analysis framework based on a generalised parametric component separation approach, which accounts simultaneously on the presence of galactic foregrounds, relevant instrumental effects and external priors. We find that upcoming multi-frequency CMB data with appropriate calibration priors will allow producing an instrumental-effect-corrected and foreground-cleaned CMB map, which can be used to estimate the isotropic birefringence angle and the tensor-to-scalar ratio, accounting on statistical and systematic uncertainties incurred during the entire procedure. In particular, in the case of a Simons Observatory-like, three Small Aperture Telescopes, we derive an uncertainty on the birefringence angle of $\sigma(\beta_{b}) = 0.07^\circ$ (0.1$^\circ$), assuming the standard cosmology and calibration priors for all (single) frequency channels with the precision of $\sigma(\alpha_i)= 0.1^\circ$ as aimed at by the near future ground-based experiments. This implies that these experiments could confirm or disprove the recently detected value of $\beta_b=0.35^\circ$ with a significance between $3$ and $5 \sigma$. [abridged version]Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure