Sensitivity and foreground modelling for large-scale cosmic microwave background B-mode polarization satellite missions

The measurement of the large-scale B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a fundamental goal of future CMB experiments. However, because of unprecedented sensitivity, future CMB experiments will be much more sensitive to any imperfect modelling of the Galactic foreground polarization in the reconstruction of the primordial B-mode signal. We compare the sensitivity to B-modes of different concepts of CMB satellite missions (LiteBIRD, COrE, COrE+, PRISM, EPIC, PIXIE) in the presence of Galactic foregrounds. In particular, we quantify the impact on the tensor-to-scalar parameter of incorrect foreground modelling in the component separation process. Using Bayesian fitting and Gibbs sampling, we perform the separation of the CMB and Galactic foreground B-modes. The recovered CMB B-mode power spectrum is used to compute the likelihood distribution of the tensor-to-scalar ratio. We focus the analysis to the very large angular scales that can be probed only by CMB space missions, i.e. the reionization bump, where primordial B-modes dominate over spurious B-modes induced by gravitational lensing. We find that fitting a single modified blackbody component for thermal dust where the ‘real’ sky consists of two dust components strongly bias the estimation of the tensor-to-scalar ratio by more than 5σ for the most sensitive experiments. Neglecting in the parametric model the curvature of the synchrotron spectral index may bias the estimated tensor-to-scalar ratio by more than 1σ. For sensitive CMB experiments, omitting in the foreground modelling a 1 per cent polarized spinning dust component may induce a non-negligible bias in the estimated tensor-to-scalar ratio. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.