Abstract
Current and future Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation experiments are targeting the polarized B-mode signal. The small amplitude of this signal makes a successful measurement challenging for current technologies. Therefore, very accurate studies to mitigate and control possible systematic effects are vital to achieve a successful observation. An additional challenge is coming from the presence of polarized Galactic foreground signals that contaminate the CMB signal. When they are combined, the foreground signals dominate the polarized CMB signal at almost every relevant frequency. Future experiments, like the LiteBIRD space-borne mission, aim at measuring the CMB B-mode signal with high accuracy to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio r at the 10−3 level. We present a method to study the photometric calibration requirement needed to minimize the leakage of polarized Galactic foreground signals into CMB polarization maps for a multi-frequency CMB experiment. We applied this method to the LiteBIRD case, and we found precision requirements for the photometric calibration in the range ∼10−4–2.5×10−3 depending on the frequency band. Under the assumption that the detectors are uncorrelated, we found requirements per detector in the range ∼0.18×10−2–2.0×10−2. Finally, we relate the calibration requirements to the band-pass resolution to define constraints for a few representative band-pass responses: Δν∼0.2–2 GHz.