A joint analysis of Planck and BICEP2 B modes including dust polarization uncertainty

TL;DR

This paper jointly analyzes Planck and BICEP2 data considering dust polarization uncertainties, leading to tighter constraints on primordial gravitational waves and inflation models, emphasizing the importance of accurate dust maps.

Contribution

It introduces a dust polarization model with minimal assumptions and demonstrates how dust uncertainties affect the tensor-to-scalar ratio constraints.

Findings

Upper limit on tensor-to-scalar ratio r<0.11 without dust constraints

Including dust data improves the limit to r<0.09

Dust polarization maps significantly impact inflation model constraints

Abstract

We analyze BICEP2 and Planck data using a model that includes CMB lensing, gravity waves, and polarized dust. Planck dust polarization maps have highlighted the difficulty of estimating the dust polarization in low intensity regions, suggesting that the polarization fractions have considerable uncertainties and may be significantly higher than previous predictions. In this paper, we start by assuming nothing about the dust polarization except for the power spectrum shape, which we take to be $C_{l}^{BB} \propto l^{-2.42}$. The resulting joint BICEP2+Planck analysis favors solutions without gravity waves, and the upper limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio is $r<0.11$, a slight improvement relative to the Planck analysis alone which gives $r<0.13$ (95% c.l.). The estimated amplitude of the dust polarization power spectrum agrees with expectations for this field based on both HI column density and Planck polarization measurements at 353 GHz in the BICEP2 field. Including the latter constraint in our analysis improves the limit further to $r < 0.09$, placing strong constraints on inflation (e.g., models with $r>0.14$ are excluded with 99.5% confidence). We address the cross-correlation analysis of BICEP2 at 150 GHz with BICEP1 at 100 GHz as a test of foreground contamination. We find that the null hypothesis of dust and lensing with $r=0$ gives $\Delta \chi^2<2$ relative to the hypothesis of no dust, so the frequency analysis does not strongly favor either model over the other. We also discuss how more accurate dust polarization maps may improve our constraints. If the dust polarization is measured perfectly, the limit can reach $r<0.05$, but this degrades quickly to almost no improvement if the dust calibration error is 20% or larger or if the dust maps are not processed through the BICEP2 pipeline, inducing sampling variance noise. (Abridged.)