Calibration of CMB Polarisation Using Cross-Experiment Correlations

Abstract

Parity-violating physics in the Universe can generate correlations between the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) $E$- and $B$-modes, but detecting such signals requires extremely accurate calibration of instruments. We describe a data-driven method to calibrate the relative polarisation angle between CMB experiments using cross-correlations of observations over a common sky region. Unlike standard self-calibration approaches, this method does not assume vanishing isotropic cosmic birefringence or primordial $EB$ correlations when estimating the relative misalignment angle, and therefore preserves sensitivity to parity-violating physics. As a proof of concept, we forecast the performance of this method using the Simons Observatory (SO) Small Aperture Telescopes (SATs) as a calibrated reference. If they can be calibrated to an uncertainty of $0.08^\circ$, as anticipated from the SO wire grid calibration system, we show that the SO Large Aperture Telescope and Planck could be calibrated to uncertainties of $0.10^\circ$ and $0.17^\circ$, respectively, at $\sim 145$ GHz. This approach relies on the availability of at least one well-calibrated instrument, and provides a complementary path to improving polarisation calibration across experiments, enabling more robust searches for parity-violating physics in the CMB, such as cosmic birefringence.