2025/01/21 by Yunyang Li, Joseph R. Eimer, Li, Yunyang +83 · 1 voice · 5 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Computational Physics and Python Applications #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.11904
openalex publication_date 2025/01/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present measurements of large-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) E-mode polarization from the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) 90 GHz data. Using 115 det-yr of observations collected through 2024 with a variable-delay polarization modulator, we achieved a polarization sensitivity of 78 μK arcmin, comparable to Planck at similar frequencies (100 and 143 GHz). The analysis demonstrates effective mitigation of systematic errors and addresses challenges to large-angular-scale power recovery posed by time-domain filtering in maximum-likelihood map-making. A novel implementation of the pixel-space transfer matrix is introduced, which enables efficient filtering simulations and bias correction in the power spectrum using the quadratic cross-spectrum estimator. Overall, we achieved an unbiased time-domain filtering correction to recover the largest angular scale polarization, with the only power deficit, arising from map-making non-linearity, being characterized as less than 3%. Through cross-correlation with Planck, we detected the cosmic reionization at 99.4% significance and measured the reionization optical depth τ=0.053+0.018-0.019, marking the first ground-based attempt at such a measurement. At intermediate angular scales (ℓ>30), our results, both independently and in cross-correlation with Planck, remain fully consistent with Planck's measurements.