DOI

10.1088/0067-0049/206/2/24

Abstract

We investigate the impact of instrumental systematic errors in interferometric measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization power spectra. We simulate interferometric CMB observations to generate mock visibilities and estimate power spectra using the statistically optimal maximum likelihood technique. We define a quadratic error measure to determine allowable levels of systematic error that does not induce power spectrum errors beyond a given tolerance. As an example, in this study we focus on differential pointing errors. The effects of other systematics can be simulated by this pipeline in a straightforward manner. We find that, in order to accurately recover the underlying B-modes for r = 0.01 at 28 < l < 384, Gaussian-distributed pointing errors must be controlled to 0°.7 root mean square for an interferometer with an antenna configuration similar to QUBIC, in agreement with analytical estimates. Only the statistical uncertainty for 28 < l < 88 would be changed at ∼10% level.With the same instrumental configuration, we find that the pointing errors would slightly bias the 2σupper limit of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r by ∼10%. We also show that the impact of pointing errors on the TB and EB measurements is negligibly small.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-2013

Publisher Statement

Copyright © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. This article first appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 206, no. 24 (June 01, 2013): 1-24. doi:10.1088/0067-0049/206/2/24..

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