2001/08/15 by Antony Lewis, A. Challinor, Lewis, Antony +4
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #astro-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0108251
4 pages, 2 figures. This is a shorter version of astro-ph/0106536 using tensor notation. Minor changes to be consistent with the long version
openalex publication_date 2001/08/15 · arxiv created 2001/11/06 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The full sky cosmic microwave background polarization field can be decomposed into `electric' and `magnetic' components. Working in harmonic space we construct magnetic variables that can be measured from observations over only a portion of the sky. Our construction is exact for azimuthally symmetric patches, but should continue to perform well for arbitrary patches. For isotropic, uncorrelated noise the variables have a very simple diagonal noise correlation, and further analysis using them should be no harder than analysing the temperature field. We estimate the tensor mode amplitude that could be detected by the Planck satellite and discuss the sensitivity of future experiments in the presence of a contaminating weak lensing signal.