2024/06/06 by David Zegeye, Zegeye, David, Thomas Crawford +7 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.04326
Contemporary cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments typically have observing bands covering the range 20 - 800 GHz. Certain science goals, including the detection of μ-type distortions to the CMB spectrum and the characterization of low-frequency foregrounds, benefit from extended low-frequency coverage, but the standard CMB detector technology is not trivially adaptable to radio wavelengths. We propose using the upcoming Square Kilometer Array (SKA) as a CMB experiment, exploiting the immense raw sensitivity of SKA, in particular in single-dish mode, to measure medium-to-large-angular-scale modes of the CMB at radio wavelengths. As a worked example, we forecast the power of SKA combined with the upcoming LiteBIRD CMB space mission to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity through measurements of the correlation between anisotropies in the CMB μ-distortion, temperature, and E-mode polarization fields. We find that adding SKA data significantly improves the constraints on f_\textrmnl, even for spatially varying low-frequency foregrounds.