Blind MD-MC Component Separation for Polarized Observations of the CMB with the EM Algorithm

Abstract

We present the PolEMICA [Aumont & Macias-Perez 2007] (Polarized Expectation-Maximization Independent Component Analysis) algorithm which is an extension to polarization of the SMICA [Delabrouille et al. 2003] temperature component separation method. This algorithm allows us to estimate blindly in harmonic space multiple physical components from multi-detectors polarized sky maps. Assuming a linear noisy mixture of components we are able to reconstruct jointly the electromagnetic spectra of the components for each mode T, E and B, as well as the temperature and polarization spatial power spectra, TT, EE, BB, TE, TB and EB for each of the physical components and for the noise on each of the detectors. This has been tested using full sky simulations of the Planck satellite polarized channels for a 14-months nominal mission assuming a simple linear sky model including CMB, and optionally Galactic synchrotron and dust emissions.