A new method for measuring the CMB temperature quadrupole with an accuracy better than cosmic variance

Abstract

We present a new method for measuring the CMB temperature quadrupole, using large scale CMB polarization. The method exploits the fact that CMB polarization is partially sourced by the local temperature quadrupole. We link the temperature with the polarization spectrum directly by relating the local quadrupole at the onset of reionization to both of them. The dominant contribution is at l<30 and since we use many l values, we can reduce the error significantly below cosmic variance. In particular, for our fiducial model, the error on the temperature quadrupole is reduced to 24%. This has the potential of reducing the probability of a low quadrupole by two orders of magnitude.