An Accurate Reconstruction of CMB E Mode Signal over Large Angular Scales using Prior Information of CMB Covariance Matrix in ILC Algorithm

Abstract

In the recent years, the internal-linear-combination (ILC) method was investigated extensively in the context of reconstruction of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy signal using observations obtained by WMAP and Planck satellite missions. In this article, we, for the first time, apply the ILC method to reconstruct the large scale CMB E mode polarization signal, which serves as the unique probe of ionization history of the Universe, using simulated observations of 15 frequency CMB polarization maps of future generation COrE satellite mission. We find that usual ILC cleaned E mode map is highly erroneous due to presence of a chance-correlation between CMB and astrophysical foreground components in the empirical covariance matrix which is used to estimate the weight factors. The cleaned angular power spectrum for E mode is strongly biased and erroneous due to these chance correlation factors. In order to address the issues of bias and errors we extend and improve the usual ILC method for CMB E mode reconstruction by incorporating prior information of theoretical E mode angular power spectrum while estimating the weights for linear combination of input maps. Using the E mode covariance matrix effectively suppresses the CMB-foreground chance correlation power leading to an accurate reconstruction of cleaned CMB E mode map and its angular power spectrum. We provide a comparative study of the performance of the usual ILC and the new method over large angular scales of the sky and show that the later produces significantly statistically improved results than the former. The new E mode CMB angular power spectrum contains neither any significant negative bias at the low multipoles nor any positive foreground bias at relatively higher mutlipoles. The error estimates of the cleaned spectrum agree very well with the cosmic variance induced error.