CMB polarization TE power spectrum estimation with non-circular beam

Abstract

Precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy have been one of the foremost concerns in modern cosmology as it provides valuable information on the cosmology of the universe. However, an accurate estimation of the CMB power spectrum faces many challenges as the CMB experiments sensitivity increases. Furthermore, for polarization experiments the precision of measurement is complicated by the fact that the polarisation signal is very faint compared to the measured total intensity, and could be impossible to detect in the presence of high level of systematics. One of the most important source of errors in CMB polarization experiment is the beam asymmetry. For large data set the estimation of the CMB polarization power spectrum with standard optimal Maximum Likelihood (ML) is prohibitive for high resolution CMB experiments due to the enormous required computation time. In this paper, we present a semi-analytical framework using the pseudo-$C_{l}$ estimator to compute the power spectrum TE of the temperature anisotropy and the E-component of the polarization radiation field using non-circular beams. We adopt a model of beams obtained from a perturbative expansion of the beam around a circular (axisymmetric) one in harmonic space, and compute the resulting bias matrix which relates the true power spectrum with the observed one using an efficient algorithm for rapid computation. We show that for a multipole up to $l_{max}=500$, the bias matrix can be computed in less than one second with a single CPU processor at 2.53 GHz. We find that the uncertainties induced by the beam asymmetry in the polarization power spectrum at the peak of the bias matrix for WMAP and Planck experiments can be as large as a few 10 to 20% (upper limit for Planck LFI 30 GHz)