Smoothing methods comparison for CMB E- and B-mode separation

TL;DR

This paper compares three smoothing methods for E-B mode separation in CMB polarization data, finding that different methods are optimal depending on the analysis goal and smoothing region size.

Contribution

It provides a systematic comparison of smoothing techniques, highlighting their effects on leakage residuals and offering guidance for choosing methods based on analysis needs.

Findings

extit{sin}- and extit{cos}-smoothing are better for minimal information loss and smaller regions.

Gaussian smoothing is preferable for cleaner B-mode maps with larger smoothing regions.

Leakage in Gaussian smoothing mainly concentrates on two bands, easing further reduction efforts.

Abstract

The anisotropies of the B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background radiation play a crucial role for the study of the very early Universe. However, in the real observation, the mixture of the E-mode and B-mode can be caused by the partial sky surveys, which must be separated before applied to the cosmological explanation. The separation method developed by Smith (\citealt{PhysRevD.74.083002}) has been widely adopted, where the edge of the top-hat mask should be smoothed to avoid the numerical errors. In this paper, we compare three different smoothing methods, and investigate the leakage residuals of the E-B mixture. We find that, if the less information loss is needed and the smaller region is smoothed in the analysis, the \textit{sin}- and \textit{cos}-smoothing methods are better. However, if we need a clean constructed B-mode map, the larger region around the mask edge should be smoothed. In this case, the \textit{Gaussian}-smoothing method becomes much better. In addition, we find that the leakage caused by the numerical errors in the \textit{Gaussian}-smoothing method mostly concentrates on two bands, which is quite easy to be reduced for the further E-B separations.