BICEP/ Keck XVIII: Measurement of BICEP3 polarization angles and consequences for constraining cosmic birefringence and inflation

作者：P. A. R. Ade, Zeeshan Ahmed, M. Amiri, D. Barkats, R. Basu Thakur, C. A. Bischoff, D. Beck, J. J. Bock, H. Boenish, V. Buza, J. R. Cheshire, J. Connors, J. Cornelison, M. Crumrine, A. J. Cukierman, E. V. Denison, L. Duband, M. Eiben, Benjamin D. Elwood, S. Fatigoni, J. P. Filippini, Marcos Fraga Fortes, M. Gao, C. Giannakopoulos, N. Goeckner-Wald, D. C. Goldfinger, J. Grayson, Amy Greathouse, P. K. Grimes, G. Hall, George Halal, M. Halpern, E. Hand, S. A. Harrison, S. Henderson, J. Hubmayr, H. Hui, K. D. Irwin, Ji‐hyun Kang, K. S. Karkare, S. Kefeli, J. M. Kovac, C.-L. Kuo, K. Lau, Margaret Lautzenhiser, A. Lennox, Tingting Liu, K. G. Megerian, L. Minutolo, L. Moncelsi, Y. Nakato, H. T. Nguyen, Roger O’Brient, Arpit R. Patel, M. A. Petroff, Annie Polish, T. Prouvé, C. Pryke, C. D. Reintsema, T. Romand, Maria Salatino, A. Schillaci, B. Schmitt, Baibhav Singari, Kurt Sjoberg, A. Soliman, T. St Germaine, A. Steiger, B. Steinbach, R. Sudiwala, K. L. Thompson, C. Tsai, C. Tucker, A. D. Turner, C. Vergès, A. G. Vieregg, A. Wandui, A. C. Weber, J. Willmert, W. L. K. Wu, Haixuan Yang, Cong Yu, Lingzhen Zeng, C. Zhang, S. Zhang · 发表于：Physical review. D/Physical review. D. · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1103/physrevd.111.063505 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Cosmology and Gravitation Theories、Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena、Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics

We use a custom-made calibrator to measure individual detectors' polarization angles of BICEP3, a small aperture telescope observing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at 95 GHz from the South Pole. We describe our calibration strategy and the statistical and systematic uncertainties associated with the measurement. We reach an unprecedented precision for such measurement on a CMB experiment, with a repeatability for each detector pair of 0.02\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{}. We show that the relative angles measured using this method are in excellent agreement with those extracted from CMB data. Because the absolute measurement is currently limited by a systematic uncertainty, we do not derive cosmic birefringence constraints from BICEP3 data in this work. Rather, we forecast the sensitivity of BICEP3 sky maps for such analysis. We investigate the relative contributions of instrument noise, lensing, and dust, as well as astrophysical and instrumental systematics. We also explore the constraining power of different angle estimators, depending on analysis choices. We establish that the BICEP3 2-year dataset (2017--2018) has an on-sky sensitivity to the cosmic birefringence angle of ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}=0.078\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{}$, which could be improved to ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}=0.055\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{}$ by adding all of the existing BICEP3 data (through 2023). Furthermore, we emphasize the poss...