Testing Cosmic Microwave Background Anomalies in E-mode Polarization with Current and Future Data

In this paper, we explore the power of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization (E-mode) data to corroborate four potential anomalies in CMB temperature data: the lack of large angular-scale correlations, the alignment of the quadrupole and octupole (Q–O), the point-parity asymmetry, and t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal 2023-03, Vol.945 (1), p.79
Main Authors: Shi, Rui, Marriage, Tobias A., Appel, John W., Bennett, Charles L., Chuss, David T., Cleary, Joseph, Eimer, Joseph R., Dahal, Sumit, Datta, Rahul, Espinoza, Francisco, Li, Yunyang, Miller, Nathan J., Núñez, Carolina, Padilla, Ivan L., Petroff, Matthew A., Valle, Deniz A. N., Wollack, Edward J., Xu, Zhilei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alignment
Anomalies
Astronomy
Astrophysics
Asymmetry
Big Bang theory
Correlation coefficient
Correlation coefficients
Cosmic microwave background
Cosmic microwave background radiation
Cosmology
Early universe
Estimators
Observational cosmology
Parity
Polarization
Quadrupoles
Temperature data
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In this paper, we explore the power of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization (E-mode) data to corroborate four potential anomalies in CMB temperature data: the lack of large angular-scale correlations, the alignment of the quadrupole and octupole (Q–O), the point-parity asymmetry, and the hemispherical power asymmetry. We use CMB simulations with noise representative of three experiments—the Planck satellite, the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), and the LiteBIRD satellite—to test how current and future data constrain the anomalies. We find the correlation coefficients ρ between temperature and E-mode estimators to be less than 0.1, except for the point-parity asymmetry (ρ = 0.17 for cosmic-variance-limited simulations), confirming that E-modes provide a check on the anomalies that is largely independent of temperature data. Compared to Planck component-separated CMB data (smica), the putative LiteBIRD survey would reduce errors on E-mode anomaly estimators by factors of ∼3 for hemispherical power asymmetry and point-parity asymmetry, and by ∼26 for lack of large-scale correlation. The improvement in Q–O alignment is not obvious due to large cosmic variance, but we found the ability to pin down the estimator value will be improved by a factor ≳100. Improvements with CLASS are intermediate to these.
ISSN:0004-637X
1538-4357
DOI:10.3847/1538-4357/acb339