BICEP / Keck XVI: Characterizing Dust Polarization through Correlations with Neutral Hydrogen

TL;DR

This paper investigates the correlation between Galactic dust polarization and neutral hydrogen filaments using multi-frequency data, enhancing understanding of dust foregrounds for primordial gravitational wave searches.

Contribution

It presents a robust detection of polarized dust emission correlated with H I filaments at multiple frequencies, providing new insights into dust morphology and its impact on CMB polarization analysis.

Findings

Detected dust polarization correlated with H I filaments at 95 GHz.

Measured the spectral index of dust emission as β = 1.54 ± 0.13.

Found no evidence of decorrelation between filaments and the rest of the dust field.

Abstract

We characterize Galactic dust filaments by correlating BICEP/Keck and Planck data with polarization templates based on neutral hydrogen (H I) observations. Dust polarization is important for both our understanding of astrophysical processes in the interstellar medium (ISM) and the search for primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In the diffuse ISM, H I is strongly correlated with the dust and partly organized into filaments that are aligned with the local magnetic field. We analyze the deep BICEP/Keck data at 95, 150, and 220 GHz, over the low-column-density region of sky where BICEP/Keck has set the best limits on primordial gravitational waves. We separate the H I emission into distinct velocity components and detect dust polarization correlated with the local Galactic H I but not with the H I associated with Magellanic Stream I. We present a robust, multifrequency detection of polarized dust emission correlated with the filamentary H I morphology template down to 95 GHz. For assessing its utility for foreground cleaning, we report that the H I morphology template correlates in B modes at a $\sim$10-65$\%$ level over the multipole range $20 < \ell < 200$ with the BICEP/Keck maps, which contain contributions from dust, CMB, and noise components. We measure the spectral index of the filamentary dust component spectral energy distribution to be $\beta = 1.54 \pm 0.13$. We find no evidence for decorrelation in this region between the filaments and the rest of the dust field or from the inclusion of dust associated with the intermediate velocity H I. Finally, we explore the morphological parameter space in the H I-based filamentary model.