First release of LiteBIRD simulations from an end-to-end pipeline

TL;DR

This paper presents the first release of comprehensive end-to-end simulations for the LiteBIRD satellite mission, crucial for detecting primordial B modes in the Cosmic Microwave Background with high precision.

Contribution

It introduces a new simulation pipeline that generates detailed full-sky maps and time-ordered data, advancing the tools available for LiteBIRD data analysis.

Findings

Generated 500 full-sky simulated maps at high resolution

Produced one year of time-ordered data for a third of detectors

Demonstrated the pipeline's capability for end-to-end CMB analysis

Abstract

The LiteBIRD satellite mission aims at detecting Cosmic Microwave Background $B$ modes with unprecedented precision, targeting a total error on the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ of $\delta r \sim 0.001$. Operating from the L2 Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system, LiteBIRD will survey the full sky across 15 frequency bands (34 to 448 GHz) for 3 years.The current LiteBIRD baseline configuration employs 4508 detectors sampling at 19.1 Hz to achieve an effective polarization sensitivity of $ 2 \mu\mathrm{K-arcmin}$ and an angular resolution of 31 arcmin (at 140 GHz).We describe the first release of the official LiteBIRD simulations, realized with a new simulation pipeline developed using the LiteBIRD Simulation Framework, see https://github.com/litebird/litebird_sim . This pipeline generates 500 full-sky simulated maps at a Healpix resolution of nside=512. The simulations include also one year of Time Ordered Data for approximately one-third of LiteBIRD's total detectors.