Effect of instrumental polarization with a half-wave plate on the B-mode signal: prediction and correction

Abstract We study the effect of incident unpolarized signal converted to polarized light produced by a realistic half-wave plate (HWP) and evaluate the impact of the effect in the measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) B-mode polarization signal targeting to probe the tensor-to-scalar ratio r. The HWP is modeled with the Mueller formalism, and coefficients are decomposed for any incident angle into harmonics of the HWP rotation frequency due to azimuthal angle dependence. Although we use a general formalism, band-averaged matrix coefficients are calculated as an example for a 9-layer sapphire HWP using EM propagation simulations. We perform simulations of multi-detector observations in a band centered at 140 GHz using LiteBIRD instrumental configuration. We show both theoretically and with the simulations that most of the artefacts on Stokes parameter maps are produced by the dipole leakage on B-modes induced by the fourth harmonics MQI (4f) and MUI (4f). The resulting effect is strongly linked to the spin-2 focal plane scanning cross linking parameters. We develop a maximum likelihood-based method to correct the IP leakage by joint fitting of the Mueller matrix coefficients as well as the Stokes parameter maps. We show that the residual leakage after correction leads to an additional noise limited uncertainty on r of the order of 10-7, independently of the value of the Mueller matrix coefficients. We discuss the impact of the monopole signal and the potential coupling with other systematic effects such as gain variations and detector nonlinearities.