The high Galactic latitude sky at millimeter and submm wavelengths contains
significant cosmological information about the early Universe (in terms of the
cosmic microwave background) but also the process of structure formation in the
Universe from the far infrared background produced by early galaxies and the
Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect in clusters of galaxies. As the Planck mission will
produce full sky maps in this frequency range, deeper maps of selected
low-foregrounds patches of the sky can produce complementary and important
information. Here we analyze the performance of a balloon-borne survey covering
a 10^\circ x 10^\circ patch of the sky with a few arcminute resolution and very
high pixel sensitivity. We simulate the different components of the mm/submm
sky (i.e., CMB anisotropies, SZ effect, radio and infrared sources, far
infrared background, and interstellar dust) using current knowledge about each
of them. We then combine them, adding detector noise, to produce detailed
simulated observations in four observational bands ranging from 130 to 500 GHz.
Finally, we analyze the simulated maps and estimate the performance of the
instrument in extracting the relevant information about each of the components.
We find that the CMB angular power spectrum is accurately recovered up to l ~
3000. Using the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, most of the galaxy clusters present
in our input map are detected (60% efficiency overall). Our results also show
that much stronger constrains can be placed on far infrared background models.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in A&
