2007/10/31 by A. G. Polnarev, N. J. Miller, Brian Keating +1 · 25 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Amplitude #Anisotropy #Astrophysics #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Computational physics #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmic variance #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Gravitational wave #Multipole expansion #Physics #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Spectral density #Statistics #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13101.x
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 386(2), 1053-1063 (Oxford University Press) · 13 pages, 13 figures, version matches published version. Combined with 0710.3651
openalex publication_date 2008/04/08 · arxiv created 2008/05/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We examine the use of the TE cross-correlation power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as a complementary test to detect primordial gravitational waves (PGWs). The first method used is based on the determination of the lowest multipole, ℓ0, where the TE power spectrum, CTEℓ, first changes sign. The second method uses Wiener filtering on the CMB TE data to remove the density perturbations contribution to the TE power spectrum. In principle this leaves only the contribution of PGWs. We examine two toy experiments (one ideal and another more realistic) to see their ability to constrain PGWs using the TE power spectrum alone. We found that an ideal experiment, one limited only by cosmic variance, can detect PGWs with a ratio of tensor to scalar metric perturbation power spectra r= 0.3 at 99.9 per cent confidence level using only the TE correlation. This value is comparable with current constraints obtained by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe based on the 2σ upper limits to the B-mode amplitude. We demonstrate that to measure PGWs by their contribution to the TE cross-correlation power spectrum in a realistic ground-based experiment when real instrumental noise is taken into account, the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, should be approximately three times larger.