Galactic foregrounds and CMB polarization

TL;DR

This paper reviews the properties of CMB polarization and Galactic foreground emissions, emphasizing the importance of accurate foreground modeling for detecting primordial gravitational waves, and discusses the S-PASS survey data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of CMB polarization and Galactic foregrounds, highlighting recent survey data from S-PASS for foreground characterization.

Findings

Galactic synchrotron emission dominates low-frequency foregrounds.

S-PASS survey covers the entire southern sky.

Enhanced understanding of foreground properties aids CMB polarization measurements.

Abstract

The CMB polarization promises to unveil the dawn of time measuring the gravitational wave background emitted by the Inflation. The CMB signal is faint, however, and easily contaminated by the Galactic foreground emission, accurate measurements of which are thus crucial to make CMB observations successful. We review the CMB polarization properties and the current knowledge on the Galactic synchrotron emission, which dominates the foregrounds budget at low frequency. We then focus on the S-Band Polarization All Sky Survey (S-PASS), a recently completed survey of the entire southern sky designed to investigate the Galactic CMB foreground.