The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarisation anisotropies
contain a wealth of cosmological information concerning the formation and evolution
of the universe. Upcoming CMB experiments targeting measurements of the
B-mode polarisation pattern of the CMB face a major challenge both in terms of
experimental design and data analysis due to the small amplitude of the signal and
the presence of experimental systematic effects and polarised foregrounds.
This thesis focuses on aspects of preparation for the Spider experiment. Spider
is a balloon-borne polarimeter targeting CMB polarisation, it will launch in the
Austral summer of 2013 for a long duration flight from Antarctica. It consists of
large arrays of 512 detectors in each receiver, creating a large volume of data that is a
challenge to analyse, especially when taking into account noise correlations between
detectors.
We develop SPIMPI, a mapmaking algorithm for estimating temperature and
polarisation maps from Time Ordered Data (TOD). To test the mapmaker, realistic
TOD containing signal and noise components are generated from the simulated
Spider scan strategy. We use an iterative scheme for solving linear systems (the
Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method) to produce optimal estimates of temperature
and polarisation.
We present templates of the intensity and polarisation of emission from two of
the main polarised Galactic foregrounds, interstellar dust and synchrotron radiation.
We present estimates of the level of polarised foregrounds expected, focusing on high
galactic latitudes and patches that will be targeted by upcoming experiments. We
describe details of a model for the 3D Galactic magnetic field, examining both large
and small scales. We include details of the dust and cosmic ray electron density
distributions, grain alignment, the intrinsic polarisation of the emission from an
individual grain and details of synchrotron emission mechanisms. We compare the
templates with WMAP MCMC best-fit templates for these foreground components.