Extracting foreground-obscured $\mu$-distortion anisotropies to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity

Understand

Correlations between cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature, polarization and spectral distortion anisotropies can be used as a probe of primordial non-Gaussianity.

• Here, we perform a reconstruction of $\mu$-distortion anisotropies in the presence of Galactic and extragalactic foregrounds, applying the so-called Constrained ILC component separation method to simulations of proposed CMB space missions (PIXIE, LiteBIRD, CORE, PICO).
• Our sky simulations include Galactic dust, Galactic synchrotron, Galactic free-free, thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, as well as primary CMB temperature and $\mu$-distortion anisotropies, the latter being added as correlated field.
• The Constrained ILC method allows us to null the CMB temperature anisotropies in the reconstructed $\mu$-map (and vice versa), in addition to mitigating the contaminations from astrophysical foregrounds and instrumental noise.