文档介绍：New Astronomy Reviews 47 (2003) 1117–1121
ate/newastrev
The large-scale polarization of the microwave foreground
Angeelica de Oliveira-Costa a,*, Max Tegmark a, Christopher OÕDell b,
Brian Keating c, Peter Timbie d, e Efstathiou e, e Smoot f
a Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
b Department of Astronomy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
c Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
d Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706-1390, USA
e Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 OHA, UK
f Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Abstract
Most of the useful information about inflationary gravitational waves and reionization is on large angular scales
where Galactic foreground contamination is the worst, so a key challenge is to model, quantify and remove polarized
foregrounds. We use the Leiden radio surveys to quantify the polarized synchrotron radiation at large angular scales,
which is likely to be the most challenging polarized contaminant for the WMAP satellite. We find that the synchrotron
E- and B-contributions are equal to within 10% from 408–820 MHz with a hint of E-domination at higher frequencies.
We quantify Faraday rotation and depolarization effects and