BPol++

I spent part of this week in Paris (apparently at the same time as a large number of other London-based scientists who were here for other things) discussing whether the European CMB community should rally and respond to ESA’s latest call for proposals for a mission to be launched in the next open slot—which isn’t until around 2022.

As successful as Planck seems to be, and as fun as it is working with the data, I suspect that no one on the Planck team thinks that a 400-scientist, dispersed, international team coming from a dozen countries each with its own politics and funding priorities, is the most efficient way to run such a project. But we’re stuck with it—no single European country can afford the better part of a billion Euros it will cost. Particle physics has been in this mode for the better part of fifty years, and arguably since the Manhattan Project, but it’s a new way of doing things — involving new career structures, new ways of evaluating research, new ways of planning, and a new concentration upon management — that we astrophysicists have to develop to answer our particular kinds of scientific questions.

But a longer discussion of “big science” is for another time. The next CMB satellite will probably be big, but the coming ESA call is officially for an “M-class” (for “medium”) mission, with a meagre (sic) 600 million euro cap. What will the astrophysical and cosmological community get for all this cash? How will it improve upon Planck?

Well, Planck has been designed to mine the cosmic microwave background for all of the temperature information available, the brightness of the microwave sky in all directions, down to around a few arcminutes at which scale it becomes smooth. But light from the CMB also carries information about the polarisation of light, essentially two more numbers we can measure at every point. Planck will measure some of this polarisation data, but we know that there will be much more to learn. We expect that this as-yet unmeasured polarisation can answer questions about fundamental physics that affects the early universe and describes its content and evolution. What are the details of the early period of inflation that gave the observable Universe its large-scale properties and seeded the formation of structures in it—and did it happen at all? What are the properties of the ubiquitous and light neutrino particles whose presence would have had a small but crucial effect on the evolution of structure?

The importance of these questions is driving us toward a fairly ambitious proposal for the next CMB mission. It will have a resolution comparable to that of Planck, but with many hundreds of individual detectors, compared to Plank’s many dozens—giving us over an order of magnitude increase in sensitivity to polarisation on the sky. Actually, even getting to this point took a good day or two of discussion. Should we instead make a cheaper, more focused proposal that would concentrate only on the question oaf inflation and in particular upon the background of gravitational radiation — observable as so-called “B-modes” in polarisation — that some theories predict? The problem with this proposal is that it is possible, or even likely, that it will produce what is known as a “null result”—that is, it won’t see anything at all. Moreover, a current generation of ground- and balloon-based CMB experiments, including EBEX and Polarbear, which I am lucky enough to be part of, are in progress, and should have results within the next few years, possibly scooping any too-narrowly designed future satellite.

So we will be broadening our case beyond these B-modes, and therefore making our design more ambitious, in order to make these further fundamental measurements. And, like Planck, we will be opening a new window on the sky for astrophysicists of all stripes, giving measurements of magnetic fields, the shapes of dust grains, and likely many more things we haven’t yet though of.

One minor upshot of all this is that our original name, the rather dull “B-Pol”, is no longer appropriate. Any ideas?