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Future high-sensitivity measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and energy spectrum will be limited by our understanding and modelling of foregrounds. Not only does more information need to be gathered and combined, but also novel approaches for the modelling of foregrounds, commensurate with the vast improvements in sensitivity, have to be explored. Here, we study the inevitable effects of spatial averaging on the spectral shapes of typical foreground components, introducing a moment approach, which naturally extends the list of foreground parameters that have to be determined through measurements or constrained by theoretical models. Foregrounds are thought of as a superposition of individual emitting volume elements along the line of sight and across the sky, which then are observed through an instrumental beam. The beam and line-of-sight averages are inevitable. Instead of assuming a specific model for the distributions of physical parameters, our method identifies natural new spectral shapes for each foreground component that can be used to extract parameter moments (e.g. mean, dispersion, cross terms, etc.). The method is illustrated for the superposition of power laws, free-free spectra, grey-body and modified blackbody spectra, but can be applied to more complicated fundamental spectral energy distributions. Here, we focus on intensity signals but the method can be extended to the case of polarized emission. The averaging process automatically produces scale-dependent spectral shapes and the moment method can be used to propagate the required information across scales in power spectrum estimates. The approach is not limited to applications to CMB foregrounds, but could also be useful for the modelling of X-ray emission in clusters of galaxies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectral distortions have profound implications for our understanding of physical processes taking place over a vast window in cosmological history. Foreground contamination is unavoidable in such measurements and detailed signal-foreground separation will be necessary to extract cosmological science. In this paper, we present Markov chain Monte Carlo based spectral distortion detection forecasts in the presence of Galactic and extragalactic foregrounds for a range of possible experimental configurations, focusing on the Primordial Inflation Explorer (PIXIE) as a fiducial concept. We consider modifications to the baseline PIXIE mission (operating ≃ 12 months in distortion mode), searching for optimal configurations using a Fisher approach. Using only spectral information, we forecast an extended PIXIE mission to detect the expected average nonrelativistic and relativistic thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich distortions at high significance (194σ and 11σ, respectively), even in the presence of foregrounds. The CDM Silk damping μ- type distortion is not detected without additional modifications of the instrument or external data. Galactic synchrotron radiation is the most problematic source of contamination in this respect, an issue that could be mitigated by combining PIXIE data with future ground-based observations at low frequencies (ν ≤ 15-30 GHz). Assuming moderate external information on the synchrotron spectrum, we project an upper limit of μ < 3.6 × 10-7 (95 per cent c.l.), slightly more than one order of magnitude above the fiducial CDM signal from the damping of small-scale primordial fluctuations, but a factor of ≃250 improvement over the current upper limit from COBE/Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer. This limit could be further reduced to < 9.4 × 10-8 (95 per cent c.l.) with more optimistic assumptions about extra low-frequency information and would rule out many alternative inflation models and provide new constraints on decaying particle scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precise polarization measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) require accurate knowledge of the instrument orientation relative to the sky frame used to define the cosmological Stokes parameters. Suitable celestial calibration sources that could be used to measure the polarimeter orientation angle are limited, so current experiments commonly 'self-calibrate.' The self-calibration method exploits the theoretical fact that the EB and TB cross-spectra of the CMB vanish in the standard cosmological model, so any detected EB and TB signals must be due to systematic errors. However, this assumption neglects the fact that polarized Galactic foregrounds in a given portion of the sky may have non-zero EB and TB cross-spectra. If these foreground signals remain in the observations, then they will bias the self-calibrated telescope polarization angle and produce a spurious B-mode signal. In this paper, we estimate the foreground-induced bias for various instrument configurations and then expand the self-calibration formalism to account for polarized foreground signals. Assuming the EB correlation signal for dust is in the range constrained by angular power spectrum measurements from Planck at 353 GHz (scaled down to 150 GHz), then the bias is negligible for high angular resolution experiments, which have access to CMB-dominated high l modes with which to self-calibrate. Low-resolution experiments observing particularly dusty sky patches can have a bias as large as 0°.5. A miscalibration of this magnitude generates a spurious BB signal corresponding to a tensor-to-scalar ratio of approximately r ~ 2 × 10-3, within the targeted range of planned experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]