Robust forecasts on fundamental physics from the foreground-obscured, gravitationally-lensed CMB polarization

Understand

[Abridged] Recent results from the BICEP, Keck Array and Planck Collaborations demonstrate that Galactic foregrounds are an unavoidable obstacle in the search for evidence of inflationary gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization.

• Beyond the foregrounds, the effect of lensing by intervening large-scale structure further obscures all but the strongest inflationary signals permitted by current data.
• With a plethora of ongoing and upcoming experiments aiming to measure these signatures, careful and self-consistent consideration of experiments' foreground- and lensing-removal capabilities is critical in obtaining credible forecasts of their performance.
• We investigate the capabilities of instruments such as Advanced ACTPol, BICEP3 and Keck Array, CLASS, EBEX10K, PIPER, Simons Array, SPT-3G and SPIDER, and projects as COrE+, LiteBIRD-ext, PIXIE and Stage IV, to clean contamination due to polarized synchrotron and dust from raw multi-frequency data, and remove lensing from the resulting co-added CMB maps (either using iterative CMB-only techniques or through cross-correlation with external data).