The dark energy survey supernova program: investigating beyond-螞CDM
The sizes of bright Lyman-break galaxies at z 鈮 3鈥5 with JWST PRIMER
The Simons Observatory: combining cross-spectral foreground cleaning with multitracer B-mode delensing for improved constraints on inflation
Abstract:
The Simons Observatory (SO), due to start full science operations in early 2025, aims to set tight constraints on inflationary physics by inferring the tensor-to-scalar ratio 饾憻 from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization 饾惖-modes. Its nominal design including three small-aperture telescopes (SATs) targets a precision 饾湈鈦(饾憻=0)≤0.003 without delensing. Achieving this goal and further reducing uncertainties requires a thorough understanding and mitigation of other large-scale 饾惖-mode sources such as Galactic foregrounds and weak gravitational lensing. We present an analysis pipeline aiming to estimate 饾憻 by including delensing within a cross-spectral likelihood, and demonstrate it for the first time on SO-like simulations accounting for various levels of foreground complexity, inhomogeneous noise and partial sky coverage. As introduced in an earlier SO delensing paper, lensing 饾惖-modes are synthesized using internal CMB lensing reconstructions as well as Planck-like cosmic infrared background maps and LSST-like galaxy density maps. We then extend SO’s power-spectrum-based foreground-cleaning algorithm to include all auto- and cross-spectra between the lensing template and the SAT 饾惖-modes in the likelihood function. This allows us to constrain 饾憻 and the parameters of our foreground model simultaneously. Within this framework, we demonstrate the equivalence of map-based and cross-spectral delensing and use it to motivate an optimized pixel-weighting scheme for power spectrum estimation. We start by validating our pipeline in the simplistic case of uniform foreground spectral energy distributions. In the absence of primordial 饾惖-modes, we find that the 1鈦潨 statistical uncertainty on 饾憻, 饾湈鈦(饾憻), decreases by 37% as a result of delensing. Tensor modes at the level of 饾憻=0.01 are successfully detected by our pipeline. Even when using more realistic foreground models including spatial variations in the dust and synchrotron spectral properties, we obtain unbiased estimates of 饾憻 both with and without delensing by employing the moment-expansion method. In this case, uncertainties are increased due to the higher number of model parameters, and delensing-related improvements range between 27% and 31%. These results constitute the first realistic assessment of the delensing performance at SO’s nominal sensitivity level.