Work

Atmosphere mitigation in cosmic microwave background observations using multifrequency time-domain component separation

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations from ground-based observatories are limited in sensitivity by the fluctuating emission from Earth's atmosphere, mostly due to water vapor inhomogeneities. Even in atmospheric windows, this spurious signal remains the dominant source of contamination in the data. Traditional mitigation techniques include low-frequency filtering or, for polarization measurements specifically, pair-differencing or modulation with a rotating half-wave plate. The first method filters out a significant fraction of the target cosmological signal, while the second leaves residuals due to imperfections, temperature to polarization leakage, or polarized atmospheric emission. In this work, we present a new data analysis framework, based on the estimation of atmosphere emission templates using a multifrequency focal plane. The core novelty of this setup is to have detectors dedicated to atmosphere monitoring, allowing the removal of atmospheric contamination with time-domain component separation techniques. We introduce a multipole-dependent atmospheric decontamination factor A^ _ atm to quantify the relative reduction of the atmospheric contamination angular power spectrum achievable with this approach. Using this criterion, we demonstrate that our component separation pipeline can outperform a classical filter-bin map-making pipeline by a factor of 4000 for 30łe łe 300.

Source: Astronomy and Astrophysics

DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202662761