scholarly journals Statistical simulations of the dust foreground to cosmic microwave background polarization

2017 ◽  
Vol 603 ◽  
pp. A62 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Vansyngel ◽  
F. Boulanger ◽  
T. Ghosh ◽  
B. Wandelt ◽  
J. Aumont ◽  
...  

The characterization of the dust polarization foreground to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a necessary step toward the detection of the B-mode signal associated with primordial gravitational waves. We present a method to simulate maps of polarized dust emission on the sphere that is similar to the approach used for CMB anisotropies. This method builds on the understanding of Galactic polarization stemming from the analysis of Planck data. It relates the dust polarization sky to the structure of the Galactic magnetic field and its coupling with interstellar matter and turbulence. The Galactic magnetic field is modeled as a superposition of a mean uniform field and a Gaussian random (turbulent) component with a power-law power spectrum of exponent αM. The integration along the line of sight carried out to compute Stokes maps is approximated by a sum over a small number of emitting layers with different realizations of the random component of the magnetic field. The model parameters are constrained to fit the power spectra of dust polarization EE, BB, and TE measured using Planck data. We find that the slopes of the E and B power spectra of dust polarization are matched for αM = −2.5, an exponent close to that measured for total dust intensity but larger than the Kolmogorov exponent − 11/3. The model allows us to compute multiple realizations of the Stokes Q and U maps for different realizations of the random component of the magnetic field, and to quantify the variance of dust polarization spectra for any given sky area outside of the Galactic plane. The simulations reproduce the scaling relation between the dust polarization power and the mean total dust intensity including the observed dispersion around the mean relation. We also propose a method to carry out multifrequency simulations, including the decorrelation measured recently by Planck, using a given covariance matrix of the polarization maps. These simulations are well suited to optimize component separation methods and to quantify the confidence with which the dust and CMB B-modes can be separated in present and future experiments. We also provide an astrophysical perspective on our phenomenological modeling of the dust polarization spectra.

2020 ◽  
Vol 641 ◽  
pp. A165
Author(s):  
Evangelia Ntormousi ◽  
Konstantinos Tassis ◽  
Fabio Del Sordo ◽  
Francesca Fragkoudi ◽  
Rüdiger Pakmor

Context. The magnetic fields of spiral galaxies are so strong that they cannot qualify as primordial. Their typical values are over one billion times higher than any value predicted for the early Universe. Explaining this immense growth and incorporating it in galaxy evolution theories is one of the long-standing challenges in astrophysics. Aims. So far, the most successful theory for the sustained growth of the galactic magnetic field is the alpha-omega dynamo. This theory predicts a characteristic dipolar or quadrupolar morphology for the galactic magnetic field, which has been observed in external galaxies. So far, however, there has been no direct demonstration of a mean-field dynamo operating in direct, multi-physics simulations of spiral galaxies. We carry out such a demonstration in this work. Methods. We employed numerical models of isolated, star-forming spiral galaxies that include a magnetized gaseous disk, a dark matter halo, stars, and stellar feedback. Naturally, the resulting magnetic field has a complex morphology that includes a strong random component. Using a smoothing of the magnetic field on small scales, we were able to separate the mean from the turbulent component and analyze them individually. Results. We find that a mean-field dynamo naturally occurs as a result of the dynamical evolution of the galaxy and amplifies the magnetic field by an order of magnitude over half a Gyr. Despite the highly dynamical nature of these models, the morphology of the mean component of the field is identical to analytical predictions. Conclusions. This result underlines the importance of the mean-field dynamo in galactic evolution. Moreover, by demonstrating the natural growth of the magnetic field in a complex galactic environment, it brings us a step closer to understanding the cosmic origin of magnetic fields.


Author(s):  
Sandhya Jagannathan ◽  
Ramkishor Sharma ◽  
T. R. Seshadri

Astrophysical magnetic fields decay primarily via two processes, namely ambipolar diffusion and turbulence. Constraints on the strength and the spectral index of nonhelical magnetic fields have been derived earlier in the literature through the effect of the above-mentioned processes on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. A helical component of the magnetic field is also produced in various models of magnetogenesis, which can explain larger coherence length magnetic field. In this study, we focus on studying the effects of post-recombination decay of maximally helical magnetic fields through ambipolar diffusion and decaying magnetic turbulence and the impact of this decay on CMB. We find that helical magnetic fields lead to changes in the evolution of baryon temperature and ionization fraction which in turn lead to modifications in the CMB temperature and polarization anisotropy. These modifications are different from those arising due to nonhelical magnetic fields with the changes dependent on the strength and the spectral index of the magnetic field power spectra.


2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (S259) ◽  
pp. 91-92
Author(s):  
Alfredo Santillán ◽  
J. Kim ◽  
F. J. Sánchez-Salcedo ◽  
J. Franco ◽  
L. Hernández-Cervantes

AbstractWe know that the galactic magnetic field possesses a random component in addition to the mean uniform component, with comparable strength of the two components. This random component is considered to play important roles in the evolution of the interstellar medium (ISM). In this work we present numerical simulations associated with the interaction of the supersonic flows located at high latitude in our Galaxy (High Velocity Clouds, HVC) with the magnetized galactic ISM in order to study the effect that produces a random magnetic field in the evolution of this objects.


1967 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 375-380
Author(s):  
H. C. van de Hulst

Various methods of observing the galactic magnetic field are reviewed, and their results summarized. There is fair agreement about the direction of the magnetic field in the solar neighbourhood:l= 50° to 80°; the strength of the field in the disk is of the order of 10-5gauss.


1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 679-681
Author(s):  
M. Landolfi

The observational quantities commonly used to study the magnetic field of CP stars – the mean field modulus and the mean longitudinal field, as well as the ‘mean asymmetry of the longitudinal field’ and the ‘mean quadratic field’ recently introduced by Mathys (1995a,b) – are based either on the Stokes parameter / or on the Stokes parameter V. However, a complete description of polarized radiation requires the knowledge of the full Stokes vector: in other words, we should expect that useful information is also contained in linear polarization (the Stokes parameters Q and U); or rather we should expect the information contained in (Q, U) and in V to be complementary, since linear and circular polarization are basically related to the transverse and the longitudinal component of the magnetic field, respectively.


2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (H16) ◽  
pp. 101-103
Author(s):  
A. S. Brun ◽  
A. Strugarek

AbstractWe briefly present recent progress using the ASH code to model in 3-D the solar convection, dynamo and its coupling to the deep radiative interior. We show how the presence of a self-consistent tachocline influences greatly the organization of the magnetic field and modifies the thermal structure of the convection zone leading to realistic profiles of the mean flows as deduced by helioseismology.


2017 ◽  
Vol 597 ◽  
pp. A126 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Couchot ◽  
S. Henrot-Versillé ◽  
O. Perdereau ◽  
S. Plaszczynski ◽  
B. Rouillé d’Orfeuil ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 145 ◽  
pp. 03004
Author(s):  
Polya Dobreva ◽  
Olga Nitcheva ◽  
Monio Kartalev

This paper presents a case study of the plasma parameters in the magnetosheath, based on THEMIS measurements. As a theoretical tool we apply the self-consistent magnetosheath-magnetosphere model. A specific aspect of the model is that the positions of the bow shock and the magnetopause are self-consistently determined. In the magnetosheath the distribution of the velocity, density and temperature is calculated, based on the gas-dynamic theory. The magnetosphere module allows for the calculation of the magnetopause currents, confining the magnetic field into an arbitrary non-axisymmetric magnetopause. The variant of the Tsyganenko magnetic field model is applied as an internal magnetic field model. As solar wind monitor we use measurements from the WIND spacecraft. The results show that the model quite well reproduces the values of the ion density and velocity in the magnetosheath. The simlicity of the model allows calulations to be perforemed on a personal computer, which is one of the mean advantages of our model.


2017 ◽  
Vol 600 ◽  
pp. A60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Poletti ◽  
Giulio Fabbian ◽  
Maude Le Jeune ◽  
Julien Peloton ◽  
Kam Arnold ◽  
...  

Analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) datasets typically requires some filtering of the raw time-ordered data. For instance, in the context of ground-based observations, filtering is frequently used to minimize the impact of low frequency noise, atmospheric contributions and/or scan synchronous signals on the resulting maps. In this work we have explicitly constructed a general filtering operator, which can unambiguously remove any set of unwanted modes in the data, and then amend the map-making procedure in order to incorporate and correct for it. We show that such an approach is mathematically equivalent to the solution of a problem in which the sky signal and unwanted modes are estimated simultaneously and the latter are marginalized over. We investigated the conditions under which this amended map-making procedure can render an unbiased estimate of the sky signal in realistic circumstances. We then discuss the potential implications of these observations on the choice of map-making and power spectrum estimation approaches in the context of B-mode polarization studies. Specifically, we have studied the effects of time-domain filtering on the noise correlation structure in the map domain, as well as impact it may haveon the performance of the popular pseudo-spectrum estimators. We conclude that although maps produced by the proposed estimators arguably provide the most faithful representation of the sky possible given the data, they may not straightforwardly lead to the best constraints on the power spectra of the underlying sky signal and special care may need to be taken to ensure this is the case. By contrast, simplified map-makers which do not explicitly correct for time-domain filtering, but leave it to subsequent steps in the data analysis, may perform equally well and be easier and faster to implement. We focused on polarization-sensitive measurements targeting the B-mode component of the CMB signal and apply the proposed methods to realistic simulations based on characteristics of an actual CMB polarization experiment, POLARBEAR. Our analysis and conclusions are however more generally applicable.


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