Detecting Relic Gravitational Waves in the CMB: Comparison of Planck and Ground-based Experiments

Abstract

We compare the detection abilities for the relic gravitational waves by two kinds of forthcoming cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) experiments, space-based Planck satellite and the various ground-based experiments. Comparing with the ground-based experiments, Planck satellite can observe all the CMB power spectra in all the multipole range, but having much larger instrumental noises. We find that, for the uncertainty of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $\Delta r$, PolarBear (II) as a typical ground-based experiment can give much smaller value than Planck satellite. However, for the uncertainty of the spectral index $\Delta n_t$, Planck can give the similar result with PolarBear (II). If combining these two experiments, the value of $\Delta n_t$ can be reduced by a factor 2. For the model with $r=0.1$, the constraint $\Delta n_t=0.10$ is expected to be achieved, which provides an excellent opportunity to study the physics in the very early universe. We also find the observation in the largest scale ($\ell<20$) is very important for constraining the spectral index $n_t$. So it is necessary to combine the observations of the future space-based and ground-based CMB experiments to determine the relic gravitational waves.