Contribution to the 2022 Cosmology session of the 56th Rencontres de Moriond: Moment expansion of polarized dust SED: A new path towards capturing the CMB $B$-modes with LiteBIRD

TL;DR

This paper introduces a moment expansion method to model polarized dust emission spectral energy distribution, improving the accuracy of CMB B-mode detection by reducing biases caused by complex dust properties.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel moment expansion formalism for dust SED modeling, enabling unbiased measurement of the tensor-to-scalar ratio in polarized CMB data.

Findings

Unbiased estimation of tensor-to-scalar ratio achieved

Moment expansion captures complex dust spectral variations

Method compatible with LiteBIRD's sensitivity goals

Abstract

Characterizing accurately the polarized dust emission from our Galaxy will be decisive for the quest for the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) primordial $B$-modes. The incomplete modeling of its potentially complex spectral properties could lead to biases in the CMB polarization analyses and to a spurious detection of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. Variations of the dust properties along and between lines of sight lead to unavoidable distortions of the spectral energy distribution (SED) that can not be easily anticipated by standard component separation methods. This issue can be tackled using a moment expansion of the dust SED, an innovative parametrization method imposing minimal assumptions on the sky complexity. In the recent work [Vacher \emph{et al.} (2022)]\cite{Vacher_2022}, we apply this formalism to the $B$-mode cross-angular power spectra computed from simulated \lb{} polarization data at frequencies between 100 and 402\,GHz, containing CMB, dust and instrumental noise. Thanks to the moment expansion, we can measure an unbiased value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio with a dispersion compatible with the target values aimed by the instrument.