Polarization measurements analysis I. Impact of the full covariance matrix on polarization fraction and angle measurements

Understand

With the forthcoming release of high precision polarization measurements, such as from the Planck satellite, the metrology of polarization needs to improve.

• In particular, it is crucial to take into account full knowledge of the noise properties when estimating polarization fraction and angle, which suffer from well-known biases.
• While strong simplifying assumptions have usually been made in polarization analysis, we present a method for including the full covariance matrix of the Stokes parameters in estimates for the distributions of the polarization fraction and angle.
• We thereby quantify the impact of the noise properties on the biases in the observational quantities.