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# Spectral Components of the Radio Composite Supernova Remnant G11.2-0.3

## 1 INTRODUCTION

The proposed association between G11.2$``$0.3 and the supernova (SN) event of 386 ad (Clark & Stephenson, 1977) has prompted many years of detailed study of this object. Radio and X-ray observations made with the Very Large Array (VLA) and Einstein satellite by Downes (1984) verified the existence of a highly symmetric shell. Downes then argued that G11.2$``$0.3 was likely the result of either a 300-500 yr old Type I SN explosion like Tycho or Kepler’s supernova remnant (SNR), or an explosion similar to the event which produced SNR Cassiopeia A, but which took place in 386 ad. Morsi & Reich (1987) detected possible flat spectrum emission in the central region from high-frequency radio maps made with the Effelsberg 100-m telescope, and concluded that G11.2$``$0.3 belongs to a plerion-shell composite SNR class. Overall spectral index estimates of $`\alpha =0.56`$ (Downes, 1984) and $`\alpha =0.49`$ (Morsi & Reich, 1987), where $`S_\nu \nu ^\alpha `$, were determined from old and recent integrated flux density measurements. Further VLA observations (Green et al., 1988) produced high resolution maps at 20 and 6 cm, and revealed clumpy emission at the outer shell boundry, giving it the appearance of an evolved Type II SNR similar to Cas A. Green et al. (1988) also estimated a distance of $`5`$ kpc to the remnant based on its H I spectrum, and a diameter of $`6`$ pc. Reynolds et al. (1994) further supported the hypothesis linking G11.2$``$0.3 to the historical event through correlations between radio and ROSAT X-ray observations, but argued for a Type Ia progenitor SN.

Hard-spectrum, non-thermal X-ray emission from a source within the remnant was detected in data from ASCA, which implied the existence of an embedded pulsar producing plerionic emission (Vasisht et al., 1996), and confirmed that G11.2$``$0.3 is a composite remnant. A 65-ms X-ray pulsar (PSR J1811$``$1925) was discovered by Torii et al. (1997); subsequent observations showed the characteristic spin-down age and rate of rotational kinetic energy loss to be $`\tau =24,000`$ yr and $`\dot{E}=6.4\times 10^{36}`$ erg/s, respectively (Torii et al., 1999). The exact location of pulsar PSR J1811$``$1925 and the X-ray morphology of the pulsar wind nebula (PWN) were revealed for the first time in Chandra X-ray images (Kaspi et al., 2001).

Recent high-frequency radio observations using the single-dish Effelsberg telescope revealed the spectral index of G11.2$``$0.3 to be $`\alpha =0.50`$ for the combined spectrum of the PWN and SNR (Kothes & Reich, 2001). A spectral index of $`\alpha =0.57`$ for the shell emission alone was also calculated, by subtracting an estimated flat spectrum plerionic component.

Because G11.2$``$0.3 has long been mis-classified as a purely shell radio SNR, here we re-examine this source in light of its composite nature, as recently revealed by hard X-ray observations. In this paper, we re-analyse archival VLA data of G11.2$``$0.3 to determine its spectral index, using the technique of spectral tomography, which is a method that allows us to determine $`\alpha `$ for both the shell and plerionic regions separately. We compare the flux density and spectral parameters of each feature with results from single-dish radio studies. We also measure the structure and radio efficiency of the PWN to verify that they are consistant with other known plerionic remnants. These results will also be included in interpreting X-ray data results (Roberts et al., in preparation).

## 2 OBSERVATIONS AND RESULTS

Radio observations of G11.2$``$0.3 were made with the VLA at 20 and 6 cm (L- and C-bands, respectively), between 1984 April and 1985 May. Details of these observations are summarized in Table 1.

Data reduction and analysis were performed using standard procedures within the miriad package (Sault & Killeen, 1999). The data were flux-density and antenna-gain calibrated using the primary calibrator 3C286 (J2000 1331+305). The secondary calibrators 1749+096, 1748$``$253 and 1741$``$038 (B1950) were chosen for phase calibrations, based on observation coordinates and wavelength band. To aid in the process of detection and removal of bad visibilities, we performed calibrations on each data set individually. The header files were adjusted to match pointing centers; this step was necessary to prompt miriad’s restoring process into maintaining the smallest possible synthesized beam.

Combined images at both 20 and 6 cm were formed using multi-frequency synthesis and a uniform weighting scheme. The images were deconvolved using a maximum entropy algorithm (Narayan & Nityananda, 1986). We applied iterative phase self-calibration procedures in multi-frequency mode to make additional corrections to the antenna gains as a function of time. The resulting cleaned maps, as displayed in Figure 1, were convolved with a Gaussian restoring beam of dimensions $`2\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}6\times 1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}8`$ and $`2\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}1\times 1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}5`$ for 20 and 6 cm, respectively.

### 2.1 Spectral Index Determination

To measure the spectral index $`\alpha `$, where $`S_\nu \nu ^\alpha `$, from the 20- and 6-cm images, we first needed to spatially filter their $`uv`$ sky distributions in order to match spatial scales (Gaensler et al., 1999; Crawford et al., 2001). We degraded the nearly-complete $`uv`$ coverage of the 20-cm image to that at 6 cm through a process of $`uv`$ modelling, which essentially created a 20-cm visibility dataset with the same coverage as for the 6-cm image. This was imaged and deconvolved in the same way as were the original 6-cm data, and both maps were convolved to 10<sup>′′</sup> resolution to aid clarity in the following tomography process.

We could then compare the two images in order to make a spectral index determination using the method of spectral tomography (Katz-Stone & Rudnick, 1997). A difference image $`I_{\alpha _t}`$ was calculated by scaling the 6-cm image by a trial spectral index $`\alpha _t`$, and subtracting it from the 20-cm image, according to the formula

$$I_{\alpha _t}=I_{20}\left(\frac{\nu _{20}}{\nu _6}\right)^{\alpha _t}I_6,$$

where $`I_{20}`$ and $`I_6`$ were the images being compared, and $`\nu _{20}`$ and $`\nu _6`$ were the average frequencies of the combined 20- and 6-cm images, respectively. When the trial spectral index reached the actual spectral index of a particular feature, i.e. $`\alpha _t=\alpha `$, that region appeared to vanish into the local background of the difference image. Uncertainties in $`\alpha `$ were estimated by finding the range of $`\alpha _t`$ beyond which significant residuals appeared. If a certain area of the feature possessed a slightly different spectral index, it appeared as a distinctly positive or negative residual compared to the rest of the difference image.

### 2.2 Tomography Results

By examining the series of difference images, we find approximate values of $`\alpha `$ for the PWN and SNR regions of G11.2$``$0.3. Positive residuals appear as light emission against the neutral grey background, and negative as dark emission.

Figure 2 shows a series of tomographic images between $`0.15<\alpha _t<0.40`$ in $`\mathrm{\Delta }\alpha =0.05`$ intervals. The PWN region in the center disappears into the surrounding region within the shell when the trial spectral index is between $`\alpha _t`$ 0.20 and 0.30. Variations in the appearance of the shell interior between one image and the next suggest that the rms noise here roughly corresponds to a spectral index difference of $`0.05`$, although we observe a very clear departure from uniform emission between 0.15 and 0.30; consequently, we choose asymmetric uncertainties around our best estimate of $`\alpha _P=0.25_{0.10}^{+0.05}`$.

In Figure 3, we show tomographic images between $`0.50<\alpha _t<0.60`$ in $`\mathrm{\Delta }\alpha =0.02`$ intervals. The majority of the SNR shell fades into the surrounding background between $`\alpha _t0.54`$ and $`0.58`$; we therefore estimate a value of $`\alpha _S=0.56\pm 0.02`$ for most of the shell region. However, it appears that the SNR spectral index is not completely uniform, most noticeably in the southeastern region. At $`\alpha _t=0.52`$, dark patches can be seen in the outer shell; likewise, lingering positive residuals appear as lighter emission in the inner shell of the same region at $`\alpha _t=0.58`$. This gradient indicates that the spectrum for the outer shell is slightly flatter, and the inner shell slightly steeper, than for the bulk of the remnant. However, it should be noted that the similar size of the 6-cm beam relative to G11.2$``$0.3 may have produced this apparent gradient if the primary beam is not perfectly modeled. Mosaiced VLA observations are currently underway which will verify this feature.

Our measured values for $`\alpha _P`$ and $`\alpha _S`$ are in agreement with single-dish data as published by Kothes & Reich (2001), who predict a fitted spectral index of $`\alpha _{total}=0.50\pm 0.02`$ from integrated flux density values of the total remnant. Assuming a flat spectrum core of $`\alpha _P=0`$, they subtracted the pulsar wind component of the emission from the total, and inferred $`\alpha _S=0.57`$. This value is well within the uncertainty of our result. They also discuss shell structure, specifically, the southeastern region’s appearance of being in a later evolutionary phase than the rest of the SNR, based on polarization properties and X-ray observations. The possibility of a connection between their conclusion and our detected gradient in $`\alpha `$ should perhaps be investigated further.

### 2.3 Flux Density

Using miriad, we determined the integrated flux over various regions in the source, and subtracted the background signal estimated from nearby sky. We estimate the background-subtracted flux density of the entire source to be $`S_T=16.6\pm 0.9`$ Jy at 20 cm and $`8.4\pm 0.9`$ Jy at 6 cm. Similarly, we subtract the background interior to the shell surrounding the plerionic region to find the PWN flux density $`S_P=0.36\pm 0.23`$ Jy (20 cm) and $`0.32\pm 0.18`$ Jy (6 cm). The uncertainties are inferred from the rms variations of flux in the background; however, while the exterior background was relatively uniform in brightness, the interior background was highly irregular, causing the large uncertainties in the PWN flux. We then estimate the SNR shell flux density to be $`S_S=16.2\pm 1.1`$ Jy (20 cm) and $`8.0\pm 1.1`$ Jy (6 cm) based on these measured results.

The greatest source of systematic uncertainty in these values is a result of flux missing due to the nature of interferometric measurements having incomplete $`uv`$ coverage. Single-dish measurements would not be subject to the same uncertainty; consequently, in comparing our results with those of Kothes & Reich (2001), we estimate that $`5`$% of the total 20-cm flux and $`12`$% of 6-cm total flux is missing from our maps. We also measure the amount of missing 6-cm emission resulting from incomplete coverage by comparing the flux levels found in the 20-cm image before and after the $`uv`$ modelling process. This $`11`$% difference in the total object and $`13`$% difference in the plerion indicates how much flux is lost in the 20-cm data by degrading it to 6-cm visibility, thereby implying that the 6-cm data are also missing $`11`$%$`13`$% flux.

## 3 DISCUSSION

### 3.1 Spectral Properties

We now compare the results of past studies (see Table 2) with our measurements of spectral index and flux density at 20 cm. To do this, we plot an integrated fitted spectrum of the form

$$S_T=S_S(\nu /1461)^{\alpha _S}+S_P(\nu /1461)^{\alpha _P},$$
(1)
where $`\nu `$ is the frequency in MHz. Because of uncertainties in background subtraction and incomplete $`uv`$ coverage, we choose to plot an upper and a lower estimate for each value of flux density. We set $`S_P=0.36\pm 0.23`$ as our low value estimate, because we used a region of high flux as background (i.e. inside the shell), and also because of missing interferometric flux. By assuming the lowest possible background (i.e. outside the shell), we find a high value for $`S_P`$, which gives a low limit estimate for $`S_S`$ of $`15.4\pm 0.9`$ Jy. In order to account for possible missing interferometric flux, we deduce high flux estimates by subtracting our lower bounded values from interpolated total power results of Kothes & Reich (2001). The high estimates for $`S_S`$ and $`S_P`$ are approximately $`17.0\pm 0.9`$ Jy and $`2.0\pm 1.6`$ Jy, respectively. Figure 4 shows Equation 1 plotted with our best high and low estimates of $`S`$, and maximum and minimum uncertainties of $`\alpha `$. We find our values to be consistent with single-dish values, within estimated uncertainties. The higher frequency data points suggest that the true value of $`S_P`$ may be close to our upper estimate; we therefore assume $`S_P1`$ Jy for our rough calculations of radio efficiency.

### 3.2 Morphology and Age

The tomography difference images allow us to identify each feature according to its spectral index. In particular, we recognize the region of central emission that belongs to the PWN as outlined in the $`\alpha _S`$ difference maps (Fig. 3) by the prominent area of dark emission. A contour of this region is projected onto a detailed map of the plerionic region of G11.2$``$0.3 in Figure 5. In this image, it is apparent that the protruding feature in the northwestern direction, and possibly a smaller, similar feature in the southeastern direction, is not spectrally part of the PWN, but may still be associated with emission from the interior of the remnant. A toroidal/jet morphology has been detected in the Crab PWN, so it is possible that we may also be seeing a similar shape here. If it is a torus, then it is most likely centered very near the pulsar position, with an axis of $`30\mathrm{°}`$ west of north. There is some unexplained emission south of its eastern branch, which appears to be associated with the PWN but does not fit into the toroidal morphology, in addition to the protrusions to the NW and SE, which are unassociated with the PWN. Further discussion on the plerionic structure will be presented by Roberts et al. (in preparation), as will the relationship between hard X-ray and radio emission.

We measure the angular diameter of the SNR to be $`4\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}5`$ at maximum extent, which corresponds to a linear diameter of $`D_S6.5`$ pc, assuming the distance $`d5`$ kpc to the remnant is accurate (Green et al., 1988). To calculate the average diameter of the PWN, we find the total area encompassed by the plerion and approximate it as radially symmetric, resulting in an angular diameter of $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$ and $`D_P1.8`$ pc. The Chandra X-ray image shows a PWN diameter of nearly $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$ (Kaspi et al., 2001), consistent with radio results. The ratio of diameters is $`0.28`$ in radio; we compare this value against results for other composite remants and find it to be higher than most other reported ratios (van der Swaluw & Wu, 2001). Current theory predicts two main phases of PWN evolution inside the shell. In the first phase, a bubble of plerionic gas freely expands into the supernova ejecta supersonically, until it encounters the reverse shock of the SNR blast wave, which compresses the plerion. In the second phase, the PWN continues to expand within the SNR at subsonic velocities, as described by a Sedov solution (Reynolds & Chevalier, 1984; van der Swaluw & Wu, 2001). Results of hydrodynamical numerical simulations predict the largest radial extent ratio at the point just before the reverse shock has reached the PWN (Fig. 8 of van der Swaluw et al. 2000). We detect a large PWN radius relative to its SNR; therefore, this object has probably not yet encountered the reverse shock. Assuming these models are correct, this provides more evidence that G11.2$``$0.3 is indeed a very young remnant, much younger than is indicated by the 24,000 yr characteristic age of the pulsar (Torii et al., 1999; Kaspi et al., 2001).

### 3.3 Efficiency

Gaensler et al. (2000) characterize the efficiency $`ϵ`$ of PWN radio emission by the fractional contribution of spin-down energy to radio luminosity,

$$ϵ=\frac{L_R}{\dot{E}},$$

where $`L_R`$ is the radio luminosity of the PWN and $`\dot{E}`$ is the spin-down luminosity of the associated pulsar. They establish upper limits on $`ϵ`$ by re-examining results predicted by Frail & Scharringhausen (1997), with more up-to-date estimates for interstellar medium densities. Six of the eight other known radio PWN are reported to have a “typical” efficiency of $`ϵ10^4`$. Using our result of $`\alpha _P0.25`$ and integrating over the range of 10 MHz to 100 GHz, we find

$$ϵ2\times 10^4\left(\frac{S_P}{1\mathrm{Jy}}\right)\left(\frac{d}{5\mathrm{kpc}}\right)^2.$$

Thus, the efficiency of G11.2$``$0.3 is consistent with those of other detected PWN.

## 4 CONCLUSIONS

We have imaged SNR G11.2$``$0.3 at high resolution and revealed the spectral properties of its individual components. Our spectral index and flux density results are consistent with recent studies of this source and other composite-type SNR. However, measurements of its morphology suggest that it is in an earlier phase of evolution (just entering the Sedov phase) than most other detected PWN inside remnant shells, according to numerical models. This result provides more evidence linking G11.2$``$0.3 to the supernova event of 386 ad. We also find the radio efficiency to be as expected for an object surrounding a young, energetic pulsar.

We wish to acknowledge Bryan Gaensler for helpful discussions and David Green for sharing archival FITS files of G11.2$``$0.3. This work was supported in part by NSERC research grant RGPIN228738-00, an NSF CAREER grant, and Chandra grant GO0-1132X from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to VMK. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.


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# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

The search for the lightest Higgs boson in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) is one of the main goals at the present and the next generation of colliders. Therefore the precise knowledge of the dependence of the masses and mixing angles of the Higgs sector of the MSSM on the relevant supersymmetric parameters is of high importance.

In this note we present an updated version of the Fortran code FeynHiggs  that evaluates the neutral $`𝒞𝒫`$-even Higgs sector masses and mixing angles . It differs from the previous version as presented in Ref.  by a modification of the renormalization scheme concerning the treatment of subleading terms at the one-loop level; the two-loop corrections, for which the leading contributions of $`𝒪(\alpha _t\alpha _s)`$ and $`𝒪(\alpha _t^2)`$ are implemented, are not affected. In particular, an $`\overline{\mathrm{MS}}`$ renormalization for $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$ and the field renormalization constants has been used (where the $`\overline{\mathrm{MS}}`$ quantities are evaluated at the scale $`m_t`$). The renormalization in the new version of FeynHiggs does no longer involve the derivative of the $`A`$ boson self-energy and the $`AZ`$ mixing self-energy. This leads to a more stable behavior around thresholds, e.g. at $`M_A2m_t`$, and avoids unphysically large contributions in certain regions of the MSSM parameter space. Thus, the new renormalization scheme stabilizes the prediction of the masses and mixing angles in the $`𝒞𝒫`$-even Higgs sector of the MSSM.

## 2 Renormalization schemes

The Higgs sector of the MSSM  consists of two neutral $`𝒞𝒫`$-even Higgs bosons, $`h`$ and $`H`$ ($`m_h<m_H`$), the $`𝒞𝒫`$-odd $`A`$ boson, and two charged Higgs bosons, $`H^\pm `$. At the tree-level, $`m_h`$ and $`m_H`$ can be evaluated in terms of the Standard Model (SM) gauge couplings and two additional MSSM parameters, conventionally chosen as $`M_A`$ and $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$, the ratio of the two vacuum expectation values ($`\mathrm{tan}\beta =v_2/v_1`$). Beyond lowest order, the Feynman-diagrammatic (FD) approach allows to obtain in principle the most precise evaluation of the neutral $`𝒞𝒫`$-even Higgs boson sector, since in this way the effect of different mass scales of the supersymmetric particles and of the external momentum can consistently be included. The masses of the two $`𝒞𝒫`$-even Higgs bosons are obtained in this approach by determining the poles of the $`hH`$-propagator matrix, which is equivalent to solving the equation

$$[q^2m_{h,\mathrm{tree}}^2+\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_h(q^2)][q^2m_{H,\mathrm{tree}}^2+\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_H(q^2)][\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_{hH}(q^2)]^2=0,$$
(1)
where $`\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_s,s=h,H,hH`$, denote the renormalized Higgs boson self-energies. For the renormalization within the FD approach usually the on-shell scheme is applied . This means in particular that all the masses in the FD result are the physical ones, i.e. they correspond to physical observables. Since eq. (1) is solved iteratively, the result for $`m_h`$ and $`m_H`$ contains a dependence on the field renormalization constants of $`h`$ and $`H`$, which is formally of higher order. Accordingly, there is some freedom in choosing appropriate renormalization conditions for fixing the field renormalization constants (this can also be interpreted as affecting the renormalization of $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$). Different renormalization conditions have been considered, e.g. ($`\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{}`$ denotes the derivative with respect to the squared momentum):

1. on-shell renormalization for $`\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_Z,\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_A,\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_A^{},\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_{AZ}`$, and $`\delta v_1/v_1=\delta v_2/v_2`$
2. on-shell renormalization for $`\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_Z,\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_A,\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_{AZ}`$, and $`\delta v_i=\delta v_{i,\mathrm{div}},i=1,2`$
3. on-shell renormalization for $`\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_Z,\widehat{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_A`$ , $`\overline{\mathrm{MS}}`$ renormalization for $`\delta Z_h,\delta Z_H`$, $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$ .

The previous version of FeynHiggs is based on renormalization 1, involving the derivative of the $`A`$ boson self-energy. The new version of FeynHiggs, see www.feynhiggs.de, is based on renormalization 3 (a detailed discussion can be found in Ref. ).

## 3 Numerical comparison

In this section we numerically compare the output of the previous version (based on renormalization 1) and the new version (based on renormalization 3) of FeynHiggs. We also show results for the recently obtained non-logarithmic $`𝒪(\alpha _t^2)`$ corrections  that are also included in the new version of FeynHiggs. The comparison is performed for the parameters of the three LEP benchmark scenarios . In this way, the effect of the new renormalization and the non-logarithmic $`𝒪(\alpha _t^2)`$ corrections on the analysis of the LEP Higgs-boson searches can easily be read off.

In Figs. 13 we show the results in the “$`m_h^{\mathrm{max}}`$”, “no-mixing” and “large $`\mu `$” scenario as a function of $`M_A`$ (left column) and of $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$ (right column) for two values of $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$ ($`\mathrm{tan}\beta =3,50`$) and $`M_A`$ ($`M_A=100,1000\mathrm{GeV}`$ for the $`m_h^{\mathrm{max}}`$ and the no-mixing scenario, $`M_A=100,400\mathrm{GeV}`$ for the large $`\mu `$ scenario), respectively. The solid lines correspond to the new result while the dashed lines show the old results. The dotted lines correspond to the new result including the non-logarithmic $`𝒪(\alpha _t^2)`$ contributions. Concerning the new renormalization scheme, in the $`m_h^{\mathrm{max}}`$ (Fig. 1) and the no-mixing scenario (Fig. 2) the new result is larger by $``$1–2 GeV for not too small $`M_A`$ and $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$. For small $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$ and large $`M_A`$ the enhancement can be even larger. In the large $`\mu `$ scenario (Fig. 3) the largest deviations appear for small $`\mathrm{tan}\beta `$ for both large and small $`M_A`$. While the previous prescription for the field renormalization constants leads to unphysically large threshold effects in some regions of the parameter space, which arise from the $`AZ`$ mixing self-energy and the derivative of the $`A`$ boson self-energy, no threshold kinks are visible for the result based on the new renormalization. The shift in $`m_h`$ of $``$1–2 GeV related to the modification of the renormalization prescription lies in the range of the anticipated theoretical uncertainty from unknown non-leading electroweak two-loop corrections . The new $`𝒪(\alpha _t^2)`$ corrections can further increase $`m_h`$ by up to $``$3 GeV for large $`\stackrel{~}{t}`$ mixing (a detailed analysis will be presented elsewhere ).

The new version of FeynHiggs can be obtained from www.feynhiggs.de .

### Acknowledgements

G.W. thanks the organizers of the Les Houches workshop for the invitation and the pleasant and constructive atmosphere. This work was supported in part by the European Community’s Human Potential Programme under contract HPRN-CT-2000-00149 Physics at Colliders.


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# Towards a model of full-sky Galactic synchrotron intensity and linear polarisation: a re-analysis of the Parkes data

## 1 Introduction

Current cosmological models predict the level of polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) to be at 5–10% of the temperature anisotropies at the 20 arcmin angular scale, that is at $`\mu `$K level (e.g. Bond & Efstathiou (1987)). These temperature variations have to be detected over a 3 K continuum with instrumentation whose typical noise temperature is of the order of tens of Kelvin. The detection of the CMB polarisation represents therefore a considerable challenge. To date, only upper limits on the CMB polarisation exist. The most recent results from ground based observations place an upper limit of $`10`$ $`\mu `$K on any polarised signal from the sky at the 7 angular scale in the frequency band 26–36 GHz (Keating et al. (2001)) and an upper limit of 15 $`\mu `$K at the 1-0.5 angular scale at $`90`$ GHz (Hedman et al. (2001)).

Current cosmological models also predict a shape for the angular power spectra of the polarised component of the CMB, so the measure of these spectra will provide additional information on the properties of the primordial density fluctuations and on the thermal history of the universe (e.g. Kosowsky (1996)). The variation of polarised CMB emission is predicted to peak at sub-degree angular scale. The NASA satellite mission MAP will have enough sensitivity to detect the CMB polarisation, if this is present at the $`\mu `$K level (Kogut & Hinshaw (2000)). The future ESA mission Planck will have higher sensitivity and may provide direct imaging of the CMB polarised signal (Mandolesi & Puget (1998)). The future SPORT experiment that is planned to be placed on the International Space Station also has the sensitivity to detect $`\mu `$K-level polarised signal from the CMB if this is present at angular scales $`7^{}`$ (Fabbri et al. (1999)).

A fundamental question for any measurement of the polarisation of the CMB is whether the expected signal can be distinguished from the foreground polarised signal from our galaxy. The interstellar magnetic field is illuminated by cosmic-ray electrons which spiral around field lines and thereby emit synchrotron radiation. This radiation is intrinsically highly linearly polarised, 70–75% in a completely regular field (e.g. Rybicki & Lightman (1979)). Thermal emission from dust may also be highly polarised, depending on the shape and alignment of the dust particles (Wright (1987); Prunet et al. (1998)).

As in the case of the unpolarised emission, knowledge of the angular power spectra of the foreground polarised component is essential when trying to recover the angular power spectra of the CMB. In this paper we use the Parkes 2.4 GHz polarimetric survey of the southern Galactic plane in order to derive the angular power spectra of the polarised component of the Galactic synchrotron emission. The survey has relatively small sky coverage but has 10 arcmin angular resolution, which allows the statistical properties of polarised synchrotron emission to be investigated at the angular scales where the CMB polarised signal is expected to peak.

In order to assess the feasibility of CMB polarisation measurements, study the effect of instrumental systematics and devise the data analysis strategy it is necessary to perform simulations of the satellite missions. For these simulations an input sky with all the known components of the emission is necessary. By exploiting existing observations of the microwave sky, we have to strive to construct a simulated sky which represents our best guess of some of the properties of the real sky in the unexplored regions and frequency channels. This will allow us to perform more realistic simulations of the mission and to be in a better position to interpret the real data when these become available.

We use the results of our analysis of the Parkes survey, combined with other data on synchrotron emission coming from total intensity large sky radio surveys, to produce a full-sky synthetic map of synchrotron polarised emission. The paper is organised as follows. In Sect. 2 the global angular power spectra of the Parkes 2.4 GHz polarimetric survey are derived. The simulations performed to assess the reliability of the spectra are presented in Sect. 3. The results are discussed in Sect. 4. In Sect. 5 the derived spectra are used as basis to construct a toy model of the all-sky polarised synchrotron emission.

## 2 The Parkes data at 2.4 GHz

The Parkes 2.4 GHz survey is a sensitive, polarimetric survey of the southern Galactic plane carried out by Duncan et al. (1997). The survey covers 127 of Galactic longitude (238$`l`$5), with a latitude coverage out to at least $`\pm `$5 (up to $`b=`$7 and $`b=`$8 over some longitudes). The angular resolution of the images is 10.4 arcmin. The nominal rms noise of the survey (for the total and polarised intensities) is 5.3 mK. The survey is publicly available and the data come split into 6 rectangular fields sampled at a pixel resolution of 4 arcmin. The linear polarisation signal is given in terms of the two Stokes parameters $`Q`$ and $`U`$.

The Parkes survey has been recently analysed by Baccigalupi et al. (2001) and Tucci et al. (2000). In both of these previous studies, the data were split into twelve square patches, each of size 10$`\times `$10, which were then individually analysed. Our work differs from these in that the power spectra of the different polarisation components are derived from a global analysis of the complete Parkes data.

In order to perform this global statistical analysis of the survey we have resampled the six fields of the original data into HEALPix tessellations. The iso-Latitude property of the HEALPix tessellation of the sphere makes it ideal for fast computation of the angular power spectrum of a field defined on the sphere (Górski et al. (1999)). In the HEALPix tessellation the angular size of the pixels is determined by the nside parameter. We used a HEALPix tessellation with nside=1024 which corresponds to pixels of linear size 3.4 arcmin. When resampling the survey, the pixel value in the HEALPix tessellation was assigned by weighted integration of the values of the original pixels that overlapped with the new pixel, where the weight of each pixel contribution is the fraction of its area intersecting with the new pixel. This approach ensures that no spurious pixel-to-pixel signal correlation is introduced by the resampling.

The three channels of the survey ($`T`$, $`Q`$ and $`U`$), resampled into HEALPix are shown in Fig. 1. The derived intensity of linear polaristion, $`L=\sqrt{Q^2+U^2}`$, is also shown. The maps are in Galactic coordinates.

The most striking difference between the total intensity channel ($`T`$) and the polarisation channels ($`Q,U`$ and $`L`$) is that the total intensity signal is dominated by the signal from the Galactic plane while in the polarisation channels the Galactic plane is hardly visible. Moreover many point sources which are clearly visible in the total intensity channel do not exhibit a polarised counterpart.

In the polarised intensity image the most apparent features are the extended areas of polarisation, with sizes of the order of 5 or so, which do not appear to be connected with discrete sources of total power emission. Such regions lie around longitudes 265, 280, 320 to 330 and 355 to 5. While one of these structures can be identified with the Vela supernova remnant at $`l=265`$, the origin and nature of the other features is not yet explained (Duncan et al. (1997)).

Five regions that are bright in the $`T`$ maps have been blanked out to prevent a significant fraction of instrumental polarisation from being introduced. These are Sgr A and the bright H ii complexes G353.2+0.8, G284.14$``$0.3, G287.5$``$0.6 and G291.28$``$0.71.

### 2.1 Derivation of the power spectra

The three Stokes parameters $`T`$, $`Q`$ and $`U`$ fully describe any state of linearly polarised light. However, whereas the temperature is a scalar quantity (invariant under rotation of the plane of the sky), $`Q`$ and $`U`$ are not. They depend on the direction of observation $`\widehat{n}`$ and on the Cartesian axes perpendicular to $`\widehat{n}`$ used to define them. Recent theoretical developments have shown that it is more useful to describe the polarisation field in terms of two quantities that are invariant under rotation (Zaldarriaga & Seljak (1997); Kamionkowski (1997)). These two quantities are usually called $`E`$ and $`B`$ and they are obtained by a linear, non-local, transformation of the $`Q`$ and $`U`$ map (hereafter we will refer to this transformation as to the E-B transform). The $`E`$ and $`B`$ components differ in their behavior under parity transformation: $`B`$ changes sign while $`E`$ does not. Four power spectra are needed to characterise the fluctuations in a Gaussian theory: the autocorrelation of each of $`T`$, $`E`$ and $`B`$ and the cross correlation between $`E`$ and $`T`$.

Current cosmological models predict the CMB intensity and polarisation variations to be a Gaussian field and therefore give predictions for the four power spectra $`T`$, $`E`$, $`B`$ and $`E\times T`$. Galactic diffuse emission is not a Gaussian field and so cannot be fully characterised by the four power spectra, however, since we are interested in comparing the statistical properties of this emission with predictions for the CMB power spectra we have derived the four power spectra of $`T`$, $`E`$, $`B`$ and $`E\times T`$ of the Parkes data.

The power spectra have been obtained by performing a spin-weighted harmonic analysis of the field in the HEALPix grid with the ANAFAST program (the software is part of the HEALPix package). The results of the analysis for the whole set of data are summarised in the following subsections. The angular power spectra of the polarised intensity was derived by simple spherical harmonic decomposition, also using the ANAFAST program.

From the analysis of large sky surveys, the angular power spectra of the various components of unpolarised Galactic foreground emission appears to be well described by power law spectra with a spectral index between 2 and 3. Below, we model the angular power spectra of the different components of the Parkes data with power-laws of the form:

$$C_l^X=kl^{\alpha _X}$$

where $`l`$ is the multipole order and $`X`$ may stand for $`T`$, $`L`$, $`E`$, $`B`$, $`e`$ and $`b`$, with $`e`$ and $`b`$ indicating the E-B transform of the sinus and cosinus of the polarisation angle.

The limited sky coverage of the survey and the FWHM resolution of 10.4 arcmin limit our spectral analysis to the multipole range $`l=40`$–250. Sect. 3 describes Monte Carlo simulations that were made to assess the effects of reduced sky coverage and finite resolution.

#### 2.1.1 Total and polarised intensity

The angular power spectrum of the $`T`$ channel of the Parkes survey is shown in Fig. 2. In the multipole range $`l=`$40–250 a linear least-squares fit to this spectrum gives: $`\alpha _T=1.67\pm 0.15`$111Errors quoted in this paper are estimated via Monte Carlo simulations unless otherwise stated. In the figure the angular power spectrum of the intensity of the polarised signal $`L`$ is also shown. Linear least-squares fit to this spectrum gives $`\alpha _L=2.37\pm 0.21`$.

From the images in Fig. 1 point sources are clearly identifiable in the map of total emission while they are not identifiable in the polarised channels. In order to verify whether point sources or noise at pixel scale is affecting the spectra derived from the Parkes survey, we median filtered the intensity map ($`T`$) and the derived polarised intensity map ($`L`$) by convolving the data with a kernel of 9$`\times `$9 pixels. We have used this technique to derive the angular power spectrum of diffuse emission from the large sky radio survey of Jonas et al. (1998). We showed that median filtering can be used to effectively remove point sources and derive the angular power spectrum of the diffuse component (Giardino et al. (2001)).

The angular power spectrum of a population of point sources randomly distributed in the sky is Poissonian, that is with constant power at all $`l`$. Therefore, if point sources contribute significantly to the temperature fluctuation in the field of sky, the power spectrum of that field is expected to steepen when the point sources are removed and only the diffuse components remain. The same happens if the signal is dominated by instrumental random noise. On the other hand if the signal in the field is dominated by the diffuse component, median filtering will not have any effects on the spectrum of the emission up to the multipole order where the high-frequency fluctuations of the emission are averaged out. We estimated by Monte Carlo simulation that, for a beam with a FWHM of 10.4 arcmin and a map with pixel size of 3.4 arcmin, median filtering with a 9$`\times `$9 pixel kernel allows the input angular power spectrum of a diffuse component (with a spectral index of $`\alpha =2`$) to be derived up to $`l=150`$ with an error lower than 3%.

The results of the analysis of the median filtered $`T`$ and $`L`$ maps are also shown in Fig. 2.

From the figure it is apparent that the spectrum of the total emission steepens significantly upon the application of the filtering process. The fitted spectral index values, in the $`l`$ range 40–150, before and after median filtering are respectively $`\alpha _I=1.68\pm 0.03`$ and $`\alpha _I^{\mathrm{mf}}=2.05\pm 0.03`$ (only the formal fit errors are given in this case222Since in this case we are interested in the spectral indices’ relative values before and after the filtering, the formal fit errors are representative of the uncertainty in this comparison). This indicates that a significant fraction of the power spectrum at intermediate and high $`l`$ is due to the presence of discrete signals: either a population of point sources or instrumental noise at the pixel scale. In fact instrumental noise at pixel scale is unlikely as the nominal noise level is well below the spectrum derived for the total intensity. We therefore interpret the steepening observed as due to the removal of the point source contribution.

Fig. 2 shows no comparable change in the slope (for $`l<150`$) of the angular power spectrum of the derived $`L`$ map after median filtering. The fitted spectral index values before and after median filter are respectively $`\alpha _L=2.34\pm 0.03`$ and $`\alpha _L^{\mathrm{mf}}=2.45\pm 0.03`$.

This analysis implies that, up to multipole order $`l=150`$, the fluctuations in the polarised emission are of diffuse nature and they are not due to the presence of discrete signals such us point sources or instrumental noise at pixel scale.

Even though we can exclude contamination of the polarisation spectrum by point sources and instrumental noise at pixel scale only up to multipole $`l=`$150, in the following sections we derive the spectral indices for the other components of the Parkes data over the entire multipole range $`l=40`$–250 that can be directly probed given the survey’s sky coverage and angular resolution. The reader should note from Fig. 2 that the slope of the power spectrum of the unfiltered polarised emission does not obviously change between an $`l`$ of 150 and 250, and therefore the fits given up to 250 should also be consistent with those made only up to 150. Indeed, we have explicitly established this.

#### 2.1.2 The $`E`$ and $`B`$ components

The power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components derived from the Parkes survey are shown in Fig.3. In the multipole range $`l=40`$–250 linear least-squares fits to the spectra give $`\alpha _E=1.57\pm 0.12`$ and $`\alpha _B=1.45\pm 0.12`$ respectively for $`E`$ and $`B`$. As can be seen from the figure the power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components are very similar in slope and amplitude. This is expected if the observed emission field does not show clear patterns or symmetries (Zaldarriaga (2001)).

#### 2.1.3 The $`E\times T`$ component

The cross-spectrum of the $`E`$ and $`T`$ components is shown in Fig. 4.

In order to assess whether the computed correlation signal corresponds to null correlation between $`E`$ and $`T`$ we performed a series of simulations. We generated ten random Gaussian polarised fields using the spectral indices and normalisation derived from the Parkes data to define the power spectra of $`T`$, $`E`$ and $`B`$ and setting $`C_l^{E\times T}`$ to zero. The same sky coverage and beam FWHM of the Parkes survey were reproduced (see Sect. 3).

The $`E\times T`$ spectra derived from the ten simulations showed a standard deviation around 0 of $`\sigma _l=1.410^4/l(l+1)\mathrm{K}^2`$. The grey shaded region in Fig. 4 shows the area within $`\pm 3\sigma _l`$. The comparison of the data points with this area is consistent with the absence of correlation between $`E`$ and $`T`$. If a level of correlation between $`E`$ and $`T`$ exists, this is below the level that can be probed with the Parkes data, given the survey’s sky coverage and beam FWHM.

The power spectrum derived from $`E`$ and the median filtered $`T`$ is also shown in the figure. The level of correlation is hardly affected by the filtering process (up to the multipole order $`l=150`$ where the two spectra are directly comparable), implying that the lack of correlation between the $`T`$ and the $`E`$ component is not due to the presence of unpolarised point sources (which only affect the $`T`$ map).

#### 2.1.4 The polarisation angle

In order to quantify the statistical properties of the polarisation angle variations we constructed the maps of $`\mathrm{cos}(2\theta )`$ and $`\mathrm{sin}(2\theta )`$, where $`\theta `$ is the polarisation angle. These maps are simply given by $`Q/L`$ and $`U/L`$ respectively. The sinus and cosinus maps were then E-B transformed to obtain the rotationally invariant quantities, $`e`$ and $`b`$. The power spectra of $`e`$ and $`b`$ were also derived by spin-weighted harmonic analysis. The result of the analysis is shown in Fig. 5.

In the multipole range $`l=40`$–250, the power spectra of $`e`$ and $`b`$ are well described by power law spectra with fitted spectral indices of $`\alpha _e=1.74\pm 0.14`$ and $`\alpha _b=1.69\pm 0.13`$ respectively. These values are very close to the spectral indices of the power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components.

## 3 Error assessment

In order to verify the reliability of the power spectra derived from the Parkes survey we performed a series of Monte Carlo simulations. We generated 10 full-sky realisations of a random Gaussian polarised field defined by four power spectra with shape and normalisation similar to the ones of the Parkes data. For $`T`$, $`E`$ and $`B`$ we used power-law spectra with spectral indices of $`\alpha _T=1.7`$, $`\alpha _E=1.5`$, $`\alpha _B=1.5`$ respectively, for $`E\times T`$ the spectrum was set to zero. The 10 full-sky random realisations of these spectra were convolved with a Gaussian beam with a FWHM of 10.4 arcmin and sampled using a HEALPix tessellation with nside$`=1024`$. The power spectra for each realisation were then derived by performing spin-weighted harmonic analyses for both full-sky coverage and the limited Parkes sky coverage.

The averaged power spectra from the 10 simulations are shown in Fig. 6. The top panels shows the derived average power spectra of $`T`$ and the bottom panels the derived average power spectra of $`E`$ and $`B`$. The two different cases of sky coverage are shown. The effect of the incomplete sky coverage is visible in the spectra in the right panels where the average of the derived spectra deviates significantly from the input spectra (the true value) for $`l<40`$. Above multipole order $`l>250`$ the derived power spectra are affected by the beam cut-off.

In order to quantify the accuracy of the recovery we have computed the best-fit power law of the spectra obtained from the 10 realisations, in the two different cases of sky coverage. The spectral indices of these best-fit power laws can be compared with the true spectral indices of the power spectra used as inputs for the 10 realisations. The standard deviation of the derived spectral indices with respect to the true (input) values provides an estimate of the standard error on the spectral index. The results are summarized in Table 1. In the case of full sky coverage and considering the multipole range $`l=3`$–250, one can recover the input spectral indices of $`T`$, $`E`$ and $`B`$ with an error of approximately 2% (as can be seen by taking the ratio of the SD over the mean in three columns of the table). The limited sky coverage of the Parkes survey implies that one can only fit a power law to the recovered spectra in the multipole range $`l=40`$–250. By considering the spectrum in this limited multipole range the error on the recovered spectral indices increases significantly even when using spectra derived from full-sky maps (around 5%, as taken from Table 1). The error is around 10% when recovering the indices of the $`T`$, $`E`$ and $`B`$ spectra from maps with the limited sky coverage of the Parkes survey.

## 4 Comparison with previous results and discussion

The spectral index of $`\alpha _T=1.67\pm 0.15`$ that we derived from the Parkes data for the total intensity ($`T`$) is significantly lower than the spectral index values derived from large sky radio survey (Bouchet & Gispert (1999); Giardino et al. (2001)). However this value refers to the raw data which beside the diffuse emission contains a significant population of point sources. After point source removal the index steepens to $`\alpha _T=2.05\pm 0.15`$. This value can be compared with the value of $`\alpha _T=1.9`$ for the spectral index of the same region of the sky of the Rhodes/HartRAO survey after point source removal.

The spectral index of the Rhodes/HartRAO survey steepens with Galactic latitude from $`\alpha =2.4`$ when all the data are considered to $`\alpha =2.9`$ when only the data at galactic latitude $`|b|>20`$ are taken into account (Giardino et al. (2001)). Therefore it is not surprising that when a region within Galactic latitude $`|b|=8`$ is considered the derived spectral index is flatter. The reason for this is probably a combination of the contributions from supernovae remnants and from the high concentration of diffuse H ii emission regions in the Galactic plane.

As earlier noted, the Parkes survey was previously analysed by Baccigalupi et al. (2001) and Tucci et al. (2000). Baccigalupi et al. restricted their analysis to the total intensity and the polarised intensity data ($`L`$) while Tucci et al. (2000) present results for the power spectra of $`T`$, $`E`$ and $`B`$, but not $`L`$.

Baccigalupi et al. (2001) obtained an average value of $`\alpha _L=1.7\pm 0.2`$ for the spectral index of the angular power spectrum of the polarised intensity of the twelve patches in the $`l`$-range 100–800. This value is significantly lower than the value of $`\alpha _L=2.37\pm 0.21`$ that we derived for the multipole range $`l=40`$–250. However, there are two issues to consider:

1. the angular power spectrum of the unfiltered $`L`$ (Fig. 2) shows a flattening of the slope around $`l=300`$.
2. in order to analyse the Parkes data beyond $`l250`$ where the beam suppression becomes appreciable, assumptions about the noise amplitude and distribution are necessary.

If we perform a linear least squares fit to $`C_l^L`$ in the multipole range $`l=`$100–800, assuming purely Gaussian random noise and the nominal noise level given in Duncan et al. (1997), we obtain $`\alpha _{L,l=100800}=1.75`$, in close agreement with the value derived by Baccigalupi et al.. On the other hand, if we take into account the presence of the slope break and fit the curve with two power laws, we obtain $`\alpha _{L,l=40250}=2.35`$ and $`\alpha _{L,l=250800}=1.64`$, indicating a flattening of the spectrum at $`l>250`$.

Clearly, Baccigalupi et al. derived a flatter spectral index by fitting the spectrum of $`L`$ in the $`l`$-range 100–800 without accounting for the slope break. As to the reason why their analysis did not see evidence for a change in slope of the power spectrum of $`L`$, it is likely that by analysing small patches, the derived individual spectra are noisier, thus rendering it more difficult to detect such a change.

Unfortunately, assessing the significance of this flattening is difficult precisely because the analysis for $`l>250`$ is sensitive to assumptions about the noise amplitude and its distribution.

Tucci et al. (2000) derived the average angular power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components for the twelve patches and concluded that in the multipole range $`36l1000`$ they are both well approximated by power laws with spectral index $`\alpha 1.4`$. This value is very similar to the values of $`\alpha _E=1.57\pm 0.12`$ and $`\alpha _B=1.45\pm 0.12`$ that we derived for the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components respectively.

The angular power spectrum of $`e`$ and $`b`$, the E-B transform of the sinus and cosinus of the polarisation angle, were first derived in the present work. In the multipole range $`l=40`$–250 the power spectra of the $`e`$ and $`b`$ components of the Parkes data are well described by power laws with fitted spectral indices of $`\alpha _e=1.74\pm 0.14`$ and $`\alpha _b=1.69\pm 0.13`$. These values are very close to the spectral indices derived for the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components. Fluctuations in $`e`$ and $`b`$ are only determined by variations in polarisation angle. Therefore this analysis shows that fluctuations in the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components are mostly determined by variations in the polarisation angle rather than polarisation intensity, which, over this multipole range, is characterised by a significantly steeper power spectrum.

Finally, we did not find evidence of correlation between $`E`$ and $`T`$ in the Parkes data. This lack of correlation can be interpreted as a direct consequence of the fact that fluctuations in the $`E`$ components are mostly determined by changes in the polarisation angle, which $`T`$ remains unaffected by.

Since we are interested in using these results to construct a toy model of the full-sky synchrotron polarisation at high frequencies (30-100 GHz), there are two fundamental questions that we need to ask.

i) What is the effect of Faraday rotation on the Parkes data?

As a result of propagation through an ionized medium, the direction of linear polarisation is rotated by an angle proportional to the radiation wavelength: $`\varphi =\mathrm{RM}\lambda ^2`$.

Gaensler et al. (2001) have made high resolution (1 arcmin) polarimetric observation of a 28$`\mathrm{deg}^2`$ region in the Parkes field (325.5$`l`$332.5, $`0`$.5$`b`$3.5) at 1.4 GHz. For this region, they derive a mean RM over the entire region of $`12.9\pm 0.1\mathrm{rad}\mathrm{m}^2`$. This at 2.4 GHz corresponds to approximately $`11^{}`$. However, the RM values span from 10 to 1000 $`\mathrm{rad}\mathrm{m}^2`$, with typical uncertainties in RM measurements of $`\pm 2040\mathrm{rad}\mathrm{m}^2`$. At a frequency of 2.4 GHz and resolution of 10.4 arcmin, a linear gradient of 5 $`\mathrm{rad}\mathrm{m}^2\mathrm{arcmin}^1`$ in a foreground screen can significantly depolarise background radiation (Sokoloff et al. (1998)) and affect the measured variation of polarisation angle. Beam depolarisation is also significant at this frequency and resolution for a level of dispersion in RM of 30 $`\mathrm{rad}\mathrm{m}^2`$ (e.g. Tribble (1991)).

Gaensler et al. (2001) conclude that the brightest polarised features seen in this direction of the Galactic plane most likely represent intrinsic structure in the source of emission, but fainter structures are best explained as being imposed by Faraday rotation on a uniformly polarised background by foreground material.

This is likely to be the case also at 2.4 GHz and implies that a significant fraction of the angular variations which determine the power spectra of $`E`$ and $`B`$ for the Parkes data are likely to be induced by Faraday rotation. This scenario would predict that the angular power spectra of $`E`$, and $`B`$ of synchrotron emission derived from the Parkes survey may be flatter than if they were derived from observations at frequencies higher than 10 GHz, where Faraday effects are negligible (Beck (2001)).

ii) How representative are the results here derived on the angular power spectrum of linearly polarised emission at low Galactic latitudes of what may happen at high Galactic latitudes?

Duncan et al. (1997) show that over much of the longitude range covered by the survey, there exists a background polarised component which appears to be independent of latitude (over the range of latitudes covered by the survey). Besides the Parkes data, Baccigalupi et al. (2001) also analysed five 10-patches from the Northern galactic plane survey by Duncan et al. (1999) at 2.7 GHz and three patches of different sizes at medium Galactic latitudes ( $`2^{}.5b17^{}.5`$) from the survey of Uyanıker et al. (1999) at 1.4 GHz. By averaging the derived spectral indices for the polarised emission from all twenty fields they obtain $`\alpha _{L,l=100800}=1.8\pm 0.3`$. They concluded that synchrotron polarisation maintains essentially the same statistical properties up to Galactic latitude $`b10`$.

However, by comparing high Galactic latitude fields with observations of the Galactic plane at 1.4 GHz Gray et al. (1999) find that the magneto-ionic medium which induces the Faraday rotation on polarised emission appears to be concentrated in the disc component of the Galaxy ($`b10`$). This would imply that higher latititude observations of synchrotron polarised emission at low frequencies and for similar angular resolution may yield steeper angular power spectra.

Indeed, if there is a variation of the slope with Galactic latitude one may expect this change to be in line with what is observed for the total emission, for which the angular power spectrum steepens with Galactic latitude. Moreover, as pointed out by Davies & Wilkinson (1999), the magnetic field pattern may be more ordered at high Galactic latitudes, resulting in less small-scale structure.

## 5 Full-sky synthetic maps of synchrotron polarisation

As a starting point for creating a toy model of Galactic synchrotron polarisation at high frequencies we assume that the polarised component of synchrotron emission in a given direction is proportional to the unpolarised intensity, which in this case is expressed in terms of brightness temperature, $`T`$:

$`Q=fT\mathrm{cos}(2\theta )`$ (1)
$`U=fT\mathrm{sin}(2\theta )`$
where $`f`$ is the fraction of polarised emission (or polarisation degree) and $`\theta `$ is the polarisation angle. As we have seen, at the frequency of Parkes observations this is clearly not a valid assumption, but it can be an acceptable starting point at frequencies higher than 10 GHz, where Faraday effects (of rotation and depolarisation) may be neglected.

The brightness temperature spectrum of synchrotron emission is well described by a power law,

$$T(\nu )\nu ^\beta $$
(2)
where $`\beta `$ is referred to as the frequency spectral index. In the absence of non-uniform magnetic fields, the fraction of polarised radiation $`f`$ is related to the spectral index (Cortiglioni & Spoelstra (1995)):

$$f=\frac{3\beta 3}{3\beta 1}$$
(3)
Therefore in order to generate synthetic full-sky polarisation maps of synchrotron emission at a given frequency, we need at least three basic ingredients: a full-sky map of the total synchrotron emission at a “template” frequency, a full-sky map of the frequency spectral index and a model for the polarisation angle. The full-sky map of the spectral index will be used to generate $`f`$ in a given direction and to extrapolate the total emission “template” to the other frequencies where $`Q`$ and $`U`$ are generated according to Eq. 1.

### 5.1 Synchrotron total intensity (T)

The 408-MHz survey of Haslam et al. (1982) provides, up to date, the best image of the total intensity of the full-sky Galactic synchrotron emission. At this low frequency the synchrotron emission dominates the Galactic diffuse signal (Beuermann et al. (1985); Lawson et al. (1987)). We used the 408-MHz survey processed by D.P. Finkbeiner, M. Davis and D. Schlegel (private communication). They have removed the point sources and de-striped the map by applying a Fourier filtering technique. Hereafter we will refer to this processed version of the 408-MHz survey as to the Cleaned 408 MHz map.

The angular resolution of the 408-MHz survey is 0.85. The angular resolution of Planck will vary from the 33 arcmin FWHM in the 30 GHz channel to 5 arcmin FWHM in the 857 GHz channel. Since it is conservative to assume that synchrotron emission will present structure also at the smaller angular scale, we have superimposed artificial fluctuations at angular scale $`1`$ on the original map.

The map of artificial fluctuations was obtained from a full-sky realisation of a Gaussian field having a power law spectrum with index $`\alpha =3`$ for $`l>150`$ and vanishing to zero for $`l<150`$. Before being added onto the Cleaned 408 MHz333convolved with a beam with FWHM of 0.9 the fluctuation map is weighted by the Cleaned 408 MHz map itself444A Gaussian realisation of a power law spectrum with index $`\alpha =3`$, for $`l>150`$ and vanishing to zero for $`l<150`$ has (by definition) power spectra with the same amplitude for all regions of the map. Such a map of artificial fluctuations (let us call it $`F`$) cannot be added onto the Cleaned 408 MHz (let us called this map $`H`$), where fluctuation amplitude for ($`l<150`$) is a strong function of the position of the sky. By multiplying $`F`$ with $`H/\mathrm{max}(H)`$ (“weighting”) one obtains a map of fluctuations (at $`l>150`$) for which the amplitude varies as a function of their position in a manner consistent with the Haslam map. This operation can be viewed as an extrapolation of the spectrum of the Cleaned 408 MHz map beyond $`l=150`$ with a power law spectrum with index $`\alpha =3`$. A power law spectrum with spectral index $`\alpha =3`$ is similar to that derived for the total synchrotron emission at high galactic latitude ($`|b|>20`$ ) from the analysis of the three large sky radio survey up to $`l100`$ (Bouchet & Gispert (1999); Giardino et al. (2001)).

The Cleaned 408 MHz map with extrapolated fluctuations provides us with a realistic image of the full-sky total intensity of synchrotron emission at 408 MHz up to the degree angular scale and an estimate of how this emission may look like at the smaller unobserved angular scales. We use this map as the template for the Stokes $`T`$ channel of the synthetic polarisation maps. The template at 408 MHz is shown in Fig. 7.

### 5.2 Synchrotron frequency spectral index

Besides the 408-MHz survey the other two high quality, large sky radio surveys available to date are: the northern sky survey of Reich & Reich (1986) at 1420 MHz and the more recent southern sky survey of Jonas et al. (1998). The sky coverage of the 1420-MHz survey and of the 2326-MHz survey are complementary to each other. The two surveys overlap over the Galactic declination range $`20^{}<\delta <32^{}`$ in the right ascension interval $`180^{}RA360^{}`$ and over Galactic declination range $`20^{}<\delta <13^{}`$ in the right ascension interval $`0^{}<RA<180^{}`$. Therefore we can combine the 408-MHz survey and the 1420-MHz survey in order to derive a map of the spectral index of radio emission in the northern sky and the 408 MHz and the 2326 MHz survey in order to derive a map of the spectral index in the southern hemisphere. We obtained three homogeneous maps in the following way: we took the surveys, as they are publicly available, resampled them into a HEALPix tessellation with nside$`=256`$ and then median filtered with a box kernel of 9$`\times `$9 pixels in order to suppress the point source signal.

As we wish to determine the spectral index of the Galactic emission only, the extragalactic emission must first be subtracted. This is made up of two isotropic components, the CMB and the sum of unresolved extragalactic background. The CMB brightness temperature is 2.73 K. A phenomenological expression to estimate the integrated brightness temperature of extra galactic unresolved radio sources at different frequencies is given by Lawson et al. (1987). Lawson uses it to estimate this contribution in the 408 MHz and in the 1420 MHz surveys. We have adopted it to evaluate this contribution at 2326 MHz. The total amount of extragalactic contribution for the three surveys together with basic information about their uncertainties is summarised in Table 2. For the 1420 MHz survey we adopted a baseline correction of $``$0.13 K (Lawson et al. (1987)).

After subtraction of the extragalactic contribution, the brightness temperature frequency spectral index $`\beta _{\nu 1/\nu 2}`$ of the Galactic radiation can be calculated. It is simply given by:

$$\beta _{\nu _1/\nu _2}=\frac{T_{\nu _1}/T_{\nu _2}}{\mathrm{log}(\nu _1/\nu _2)}$$
(4)
Over the whole observed region the average value of the spectral index obtained by combining the 408 MHz and the 1420-MHz survey is $`\beta _{408/1420}=2.78\pm 0.17`$. By combing the 408 MHz and the 2326-MHz survey one obtains an average value of the spectral index of $`\beta _{408/2326}=2.75\pm 0.12`$, over the whole region observed. Here, the error is only the formal rms of the spectral index maps and does not account for the systematic uncertainties. The mean values for $`\beta `$ agree well with the value found by Platania et al. (1998) of $`\beta _{408/3800}=2.73\pm 0.08`$.

All the surveys are affected by scan-to-scan baseline errors. When the ratio of brightness temperatures at two different frequencies is calculated the effect of these residual errors is enhanced. Because of this, the map of $`\beta _{408/1420}`$ and the map of $`\beta _{408/2326}`$ do not match in the overlapping region. We tried various techniques to look for a baseline offset for one of the three input maps that would minimise the differences between the two spectral index maps. However discontinuities between the two spectral index maps always remained apparent.

In order to construct the full-sky map of the spectral index, therefore, we used $`\beta _{408/1420}`$ for regions of the sky at declination $`\delta >13`$ and $`\beta _{408/2326}`$ for regions at declination $`\delta <20`$. In the overlapping region of the 1420 and 2326-MHz surveys ($`20^{}\delta 13^{}`$) we set the spectral index to:

$$\beta _{\mathrm{overlap}}=g\beta _{408/1420}+h\beta _{408/2326}$$

where $`g=\mathrm{exp}[0.5(\delta 13^{})^2/(10^{})^2]`$ and $`h=1g`$. This choice of the weights $`g`$ and $`h`$ ensures that the two $`\beta `$-maps merge smoothly into each other. The region of sky at declination $`\delta <83`$ remains un-observed at 2326 MHz. So we “padded” this region with the spectral index value $`\beta _{408/2326}`$.

The spectral index map obtained in this way is however still affected by the striation due to the scan-to-scan baseline errors in the input data. It is possible to remove the effect by Fourier filtering the data but, because the scanning direction differs from one survey to the other, one would not then be able to combine like with like. Following Lawson et al. (1987) we adopted the simpler procedure of convolving the data to a lower resolution, so that the baseline errors are averaged sufficiently for the striation on the color-scale to disappear. The final map of the spectral index is at a resolution of 10 (at FWHM), as shown in Fig. 8.

### 5.3 Synthetic polarisation angle

We found that the power spectra of the E-B transform of the sinus and cosinus of the polarisation angle of the Parkes data are described by power laws with spectral indices of $`\alpha _e=1.74\pm 0.14`$ and $`\alpha _b=1.69\pm 0.12`$ in the multipole range $`l=40`$–250. One can construct a full-sky map of a random angle having E-B transform of its sinus and cosinus with the same spectra of the $`e`$ and $`b`$ component of the Parkes data in the following way. Generate two full-sky realisations of a Gaussian field characterised by a power law spectrum with spectral index $`\alpha =1.7`$. Let us call these maps $`x`$ and $`y`$. Normalise $`x`$ and $`y`$ to the interval $`[1,1]`$. Generate the full-sky map of the random angle by computing $`\theta =\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{arctan}(x/n,y/n)`$, where $`n=\sqrt{x^2+y^2}`$. We used the random angle map obtained in this way as the polarisation angle of our toy model of Galactic synchrotron emission.

Fig. 9 shows the map of the polarisation angle derived from the Parkes data and the map of the synthetic polarisation angle for the same region of sky. The structure of the angle fluctuations in the two maps looks similar.

### 5.4 The synthetic maps at 30 and 100 GHz

In order to generate the synthetic maps of synchrotron emission and linear polarisation at higher frequencies the total intensity map at 408 MHz has to be extrapolated. One can use the spectral index map directly, assuming a fixed power law to higher frequencies, or use it in conjunction with the local electron spectrum, as in Bennett et al. (1992), in order to derive maps of $`\beta `$ between any two given frequencies and to attempt to allow for the observed steepening of $`\beta `$ with increasing frequency (Lawson et al. (1987); Banday & Wolfendale (1990)).

For the local electron spectrum, we used the polynomial fit to the spectral shape of electron measurements given in Bennett et al. (1992), for energies $`0.1<E(\mathrm{GeV})<100`$, and likewise a power law $`E^{3.312}dE`$ for $`E>100`$ GeV. By interpreting the spatial variation in $`\beta `$ (408-1420 MHz and 408-2326 MHz) as due solely to variations in a synchrotron effective Galactic magnetic field, $`B_{\mathrm{eff}}`$, we derived a full-sky map555nearly full-sky: only the region at declination $`\delta <83`$ remains un-observed at 2326 MHz of $`B_{\mathrm{eff}}`$, with $`B_{\mathrm{eff}}=2.0\pm 2.3`$ $`\mu `$G and a median value of 1.4 $`\mu `$G. This is remarkably close to the values derived by Bennett et al. (1992) who did not have the data from the 2326-MHz survey for the southern hemisphere.

The same expression for the local electron spectrum and the map of synchrotron effective Galactic magnetic field were then used to obtain the maps of the spectral index between 408 MHz and 30 and 100 GHz, necessary for extrapolating the total emission map. The $`\beta `$ maps mean values are $`\beta _{0.408/30}=2.91\pm 0.09`$ and $`\beta _{0.408/100}=2.96\pm 0.08`$. The value of $`\beta _{0.408/30}`$ is consistent with the upper limit of $`\beta >3`$ between 408 MHz and 31.5 GHz obtained by Kogut et al. (1996) and the value of $`\beta 2.8`$ between 1420 MHz and 19 GHz derived by de Oliveira-Costa et al. (1998).

The $`Q`$ and $`U`$ channels of the synthetic linear polarisation maps of Galactic synchrotron emission at 30 and 100 GHz were then obtained by combining the intensity map ($`T`$) extrapolated at 30 and 100 GHz with the corresponding spectral index map and the random angle map, according to Eq. (1) and Eq. (3). The $`Q`$ and $`U`$ channels at 30 GHz are shown in Fig. 10. The three input maps are sampled into a HEALPix tessellation with a pixel size of 6.9 arcmin ($`nside=512`$). Therefore also the synthetic maps of $`T`$, $`Q`$ and $`U`$ are at a pixel resolution of 6.9 arcmin.

Because our toy model for $`f`$ is a very slowly varying function of the position in the sky the maps of $`Q`$ and $`U`$ derived according to Eq. (1) have temperature fluctuations mostly determined by the polarisation angle. Therefore, like for the Parkes data, the angular power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of the synthetic linear polarisation maps reflect the spectra of $`e`$ and $`b`$. They are power-law spectra with indices $`\alpha _E=1.67\pm 0.09`$ and $`\alpha _B=1.73\pm 0.09`$ over the $`l`$ range 40–250 ($`\alpha _E=1.59\pm 0.03`$ and $`\alpha _B=1.68\pm 0.03`$ for the $`l`$ range 3–250, that can be probed since in this case the power spectra are derived from full sky maps). These values are very close to the values derived for the spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of the Parkes data.

#### 5.4.1 Comparison of the power spectra with predictions for the CMB

For CMB studies one is particularly interested in the properties of radio emission at high Galactic latitudes because this is where the Galactic signal is weaker and where sensitive CMB measurements can be made. Therefore, we computed the angular power spectra of the $`T`$, $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of the extrapolated maps with a Galactic plane cut-off at latitude $`|b|=20`$. The results are shown in Fig. 11, where they can be compared with the signal expected from the CMB. The CMB spectrum has been computed assuming a flat inflationary model with purely scalar scale-invariant fluctuations, vacuum energy $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{\Lambda }=0.70`$, cold dark matter density $`h^2\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{cdm}}=0.12`$ and baryon density $`h^2\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{b}=0.024`$, (where $`h=0.7`$ is the assumed Hubble parameter), as derived by Netterfield et al. (2001) from combining the latest CMB observations with constraints derived from measurements of the large scale structure and results from recent measurements of type Ia supernovae.

The top panel of Fig. 11 shows the angular power spectra of the $`T`$ components of the two extrapolated maps and of the CMB. Note the absence of a perceivable change in the slope of the power spectra of the $`T`$ components of the synthetic maps at $`l=150`$, the multipole order at which artificial signal was added to the observed signal at 408 MHz666In order to prevent the aliasing noise that effects power spectra with spectral index $`3`$ when a Galactic cut is applied we used an apodysed Galactic cut off and the modified power spectra definition given in Giardino et al. 2001, in which the terms $`a_{l0}`$ are set to zero.

From the figure, it is apparent that at 100 GHz the contribution to the total sky signal from high latitude synchrotron emission is negligible. At 30 GHz synchrotron emission can be a significant contribution to the sky anisotropy at scales larger than $`20^{}`$, but it is more than an order of magnitude weaker than the computed cosmological signal at degree angular scales where the first “acoustic” peak of the CMB is observed. This confirms the results discussed in Giardino et al. (2001) that were obtained with a different approach using the index of the angular power spectra of the survey at 2326 MHz by Jonas et al. (1998) and the COBE DMR upper limit to synchrotron temperature fluctuations at 31.5 GHz at the 7 scale. The COBE DMR upper limit (Kogut et al. (1996)) is indicated in the figure by a pentagonal point.

The angular power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of the synthetic maps are shown in the lower panel of Fig. 11. At small angular scale the power of temperature fluctuations in the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components are mostly determined by change in the polarisation angle rather than a change in the degree of polarisation. This is the reason why temperature fluctuations in the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components can become more intense than temperature fluctuations in the $`T`$ channel.

The figure shows that at 30 GHz the high latitude synchrotron signal may dominate the cosmological polarised signal over the entire multipole range. The extrapolated signal at 30 GHz is consistent with the current upper limit on linearly polarised signal of 10 $`\mu `$K at the 7 scale in the 26–36 GHz band (Keating et al. (2001)) and with the upper limit of 16 $`\mu `$K at degree scale in the 26–46 GHz band (Netterfield et al. (1995)). These upper limits also refer to regions of the sky at galactic latitudes $`|b|>20^{}`$.

At 100 GHz the synchrotron signal can make a significant contribution to the sky polarisation at large angular scale but it is significantly weaker than the CMB $`E`$ component at sub-degree angular scale. Therefore even using the most conservative assumptions one can conclude that the contribution of synchrotron polarisation to the sky signal will not hinder detection of the CMB $`E`$ component, if this is present at sub-degree angular scale at the intensity predicted by current cosmological models.

From the diagram the absence of the beam cut off in the spectra of the synthetic maps is noticeable. These are artificial maps and therefore they were generated at full resolution.

### 5.5 Scope and limitations of the synthetic maps

The synthetic full-sky maps of the Stokes parameters $`T`$, $`Q`$ and $`U`$ of Galactic synchrotron emission at 30 and 100 GHz are a first attempt to model the full-sky synchrotron polarisation at high frequencies. The maps are needed as input for the simulation activity that is carried out in preparation for the Planck missions.

To study the effects of polarised foreground on MAP observations of the CMB, synthetic maps of polarised synchrotron emission have been generated by Kogut & Hinshaw (2000). They also assumed the polarised signal to be proportional to the total intensity $`T`$, with the Stokes $`Q`$ and $`U`$ components given by Eq. 2. For the polarisation degree, $`f`$, they assumed a varying Gaussian field such that $`f=0.1`$. They constructed the polarisation angle starting from Gaussian random fields, $`x`$ and $`y`$, with flat power spectra777the fields were then convolved with a Gaussian with varying FWHM, as the authors were interested in investigating the effect on CMB observations of the eventual presence of a coherence angle in polarised Galactic emission, which lead to $`E`$ and $`B`$ components whose spectra have indices of $`\alpha 0`$. The polarisation maps were only generated for a fiducial frequency of 40 GHz.

We have constructed the synthetic maps by combining in a conservative way many of the observational data currently available on synchrotron total emission and polarisation. The maps that can be obtained at higher frequencies by extrapolating the total intensity map with the spectral index map are consistent with available observational upper limits on synchrotron emission and polarisation at frequencies higher than 10 GHz. There remain however some inconsistencies between the synthetic polarisation maps extrapolated at 2.4 GHz and the Parkes data.

The synthetic polarisation maps reproduce the slope of the angular power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of the Parkes survey, but not their amplitude at 2.4 GHz. Moreover, the power spectra of $`T`$, $`E\times T`$ and $`L`$ differ both in shape and normalisation to the ones of the Parkes data. This is because of the way that the toy model has been constructed. We derived information on the polarisation angle (and the $`E`$ and $`B`$ power spectra) from the Parkes survey, while for the intensity channel $`T`$ we used the data from the Haslam survey and for the polarisation fraction $`f`$ we assumed the theoretical value given by the synchrotron spectral index in a uniform magnetic field. The reasons behind these choices are the following.

As already mentioned, the Haslam map provides the best image of the total intensity of the full-sky synchrotron emission, to date. It is natural to adopt it as a template for $`T`$ as opposed to using the $`T`$ channel of the Parkes survey. This is limited in sky coverage and being at low Galactic latitude and a higher frequency contains a higher fraction of thermal emission from ionised gas.

The Parkes survey provides us with information about the statistical properties of the polarisation angle, so we adopt it for this purpose. Using the statistical properties of the polarisation angle derived from a survey at decimetric frequency is a conservative approach (i.e. it will unlikely lead to an underestimate of the level of fluctuation of polarised synchrotron emission). This is because Faraday rotation of a synchrotron background due to a foreground “screen” of ionised medium will tend to increase the level of fluctuations in the observed polarisation direction. On the other hand Faraday differential rotation may decrease the polarised fraction of the synchrotron signal at the Parkes frequency. Therefore using the amplitude of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of the Parkes data may lead to an underestimate of the polarisation fraction at higher frequencies ($`10`$ GHz).

Calculating the theoretical fraction of synchrotron polarisation by assuming a completely uniform magnetic fields could be considered an overly conservative approach because it is known that the interstellar medium is pervaded by an isotropic random (“turbulent”) field. In the presence of a random magnetic field the observed level of polarisation is given by $`f_{\mathrm{obs}}=df`$. Here $`f`$ is the intrinsic level of polarisation (given by Eq. 3) and $`d`$ is a coefficient ($`1`$) which depends on the relative intensity of the random field, $`B_{\mathrm{turb}}`$, and the field which is regular in the whole resolution element, $`B_{\mathrm{reg}}`$(Burn (1966); Beck (1998)).

Synchrotron polarisation observations at decimeter wavelength imply a ratio of regular to total field strengths within about a kpc from the Sun of $`B_{\mathrm{reg}}/B_{\mathrm{turb}}0.6`$ (Beck (2001)), which, in the popular assumption of energy equipartition between cosmic rays and magnetic fields would imply an average level of depolarisation of $`d=0.3`$. However the actual value varies substantially between points and may depend on the size of the resolution element. These values are derived from decimeter wavelength surveys with degree-scale resolution. The level of depolarisation by the random component of the magnetic field can be expected to decrease as the sky is observed at higher resolution and the projected size of the beam approaches the field coherence length. Indeed convolution of our synthetic maps with a Gaussian beam with a FWHM of 1 yields an average level of depolarisation of $`d=0.5`$.

## 6 Summary and Conclusions

In order to obtain information about the statistical properties of synchrotron polarised emission, we have derived the global angular power spectra of the Parkes survey, a radio continuum and polarisation survey of the Southern galactic plane at 2.4 GHz. The angular power spectrum of the polarised intensity ($`L`$) is well approximated by a power law with fitted spectral index $`\alpha _L=2.37\pm 0.21`$ in the multipole range $`l=40`$–250 that can be probed given the Parkes survey sky coverage and angular resolution. We exclude that up to multipole order $`l=150`$, the spectral index value is affected by the presence of discrete signals such us point sources or instrumental noise at pixel scale.

The angular power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of the polarised emission is significantly flatter than the spectrum of $`L`$. They have fitted spectral indices respectively of $`\alpha _E=1.57\pm 0.12`$ and $`\alpha _B=1.45\pm 0.12`$, in the multipole range $`l=40`$–250. This is because temperature variations in the Stokes channels $`Q`$ and $`U`$ of the data are mostly determined by variation in polarisation angle rather than polarisation intensity. The E-B transform of the sinus and cosinus of the polarisation angle, the $`e`$ and $`b`$ components, are in fact also well described by power laws with fitted spectral indices of $`\alpha _e=1.74\pm 0.14`$ and $`\alpha _b=1.69\pm 0.13`$, in the same multipole range $`l=40`$–250.

We generated a full-sky map of a random polarisation angle having $`e`$ and $`b`$ components with power spectra with the same spectral indices of the $`e`$ and $`b`$ components of the Parkes data. We combined this map with a template of synchrotron emission at 408 MHz, derived from the 408-MHz survey, and with a full-sky spectral index map, that we obtained by combining the 408-MHz survey with the 1420-MHz survey and the 2326-MHz survey. The simple recipe on how to combine the three maps in order to derive a map of linear polarisation is given by Eq. (1) and Eq. (3).

In this way we have constructed synthetic maps of the Stokes parameters ($`T`$, $`Q`$ and $`U`$) of Galactic synchrotron emission at 30 and 100 GHz. The angular power spectra of the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of these synthetic maps have slope very similar to the $`E`$ and $`B`$ components of the Parkes data. Their polarisation intensity is proportional to the total intensity $`T`$ as determined by the frequency spectral index in the conservative hypothesis of a uniform magnetic field.

We have compared the angular power spactra of the synthetic maps with predictions for the CMB and conclude that while direct observations of the CMB $`E`$ component at 30 GHz may be precluded by synchrotron polarisation, at 100 GHz, this component of Galactic emission will not hinder the observation of cosmological polarisation, if this is present at the predicted levels.

The synthetic maps of the linear polarisation of Galactic synchrotron can be useful as a toy model to study the effect of the polarised foreground on planned observations of the CMB. Moreover they can serve as the basis for the development of more advanced models which incorporate data on the structure of the Galactic magnetic field. In turn these refined models will be of fundamental importance in interpreting the microwave polarisation data that will be provided by the Planck and MAP satellite missions and the SPORT experiment.

The synthetic maps of the Stokes parameters $`T`$, $`Q`$ and $`U`$ of Galactic synchrotron emission at 30 and 100 GHz together with the full-sky spectral index map are available for down loading at ftp://astro.esa.int/pub/synchrotron.

###### Acknowledgements.

We thank D.P. Finkbeiner, M. Davis and D. Schlegel for providing us with the Cleaned 408 MHz map, E. Hivon for helpful discussions, A.R. Duncan, R. F. Haynes, K.L. Jones and R.T Stewart for making the Parkes survey publicly available and U. Seljak & M. Zaldarriaga for their CMBFAST software, which was used to generate the CMB angular power spectra. The HEALPix analysis package (http://www.eso.org/science/healpix) was used extensively throughout this paper. We gratefully acknowledge very useful comments from an anonymous referee.