CMB Polarization B-mode Delensing with SPTpol and Herschel

• Published in: The Astrophysical Journal
• Main Authors: Manzotti, A., Bock, J. J., Crites, A. T., Padin, S.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Astronomical Society 2017
• Subjects: cosmic background radiation; cosmology: observations; early universe; inflation; Kavli; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aa82bb

We present a demonstration of delensing the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization anisotropy. This process of reducing the gravitational-lensing-generated B-mode component will become increasingly important for improving searches for the B modes produced by primordial gravitational waves. In this work, we delens B-mode maps constructed from multi-frequency SPTpol observations of a 90 deg^2 patch of sky by subtracting a B-mode template constructed from two inputs: SPTpol E-mode maps and a lensing potential map estimated from the Herschel 500 μm map of the cosmic infrared background. We find that our delensing procedure reduces the measured B-mode power spectrum by 28% in the multipole range 300 < ℓ < 2300; this is shown to be consistent with expectations from simulations and to be robust against systematics. The null hypothesis of no delensing is rejected at 6.9σ. Furthermore, we build and use a suite of realistic simulations to study the general properties of the delensing process and find that the delensing efficiency achieved in this work is limited primarily by the noise in the lensing potential map. We demonstrate the importance of including realistic experimental non-idealities in the delensing forecasts used to inform instrument and survey-strategy planning of upcoming lower-noise experiments, such as CMB-S4. © 2017 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2017 January 21; revised 2017 June 30; accepted 2017 July 25; published 2017 August 30. The South Pole Telescope program is supported by the National Science Foundation through grant PLR-1248097. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-0114422 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF#947 to the University of Chicago. Work at Argonne National Lab is supported by UChicago Argonne, LLC, Operator of Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne). Argonne, a U.S. Department ...