Calibration of CMB Polarisation Using Cross-Experiment Correlations
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Parity-violating physics in the Universe can generate correlations between the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) E - and B -modes, but detecting such signals requires extremely accurate calibration of instruments. We describe a data-driven method to calibrate the relative polarisation angle between CMB experiments using cross-correlations of observations over a common sky region. Unlike standard self-calibration approaches, this method does not assume vanishing isotropic cosmic birefringence or primordial E B correlations when estimating the relative misalignment angle, and therefore preserves sensitivity to parity-violating physics. As a proof of concept, we forecast the performance of this method using the Simons Observatory (SO) Small Aperture Telescopes (SATs) as a calibrated reference. If they can be calibrated to an uncertainty of 0.08 ∘ , as anticipated from the SO wire grid calibration system, we show that the SO Large Aperture Telescope and Planck could be calibrated to uncertainties of 0.10 ∘ and 0.17 ∘ , respectively, at ∼ 145 GHz. This approach relies on the availability of at least one well-calibrated instrument, and provides a complementary path to improving polarisation calibration across experiments, enabling more robust searches for parity-violating physics in the CMB, such as cosmic birefringence.
Source: The Open Journal of Astrophysics
DOI: 10.33232/001c.175198
Institution: ORCID
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7164397107