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Foregrounds Workshop: Instructions to WG Leaders
Dear XXX
Thanks for agreeing to lead the YYY working group during Foregrounds workshop in San Diego. As promised, here are some thoughts to keep in mind in order to ensure we achieve the goals of the workshop.
As you know, NASA is funding this workshop as part of the ongoing study of the Probe of Inflation and Cosmic Origins (PICO) space mission. The science goals of PICO, as well those of other projects planned for the next decade, including CMB-S4, pose new challenges in foreground modeling and component separation. A final report to NASA on the PICO mission study is due in December 2018.
A goal for the working groups is to establish what can be demonstrated in terms of foreground modeling and component separation over the full sky within the next 6-8 months. These results will be included in the final PICO report. We would like to identify a plan forward including action items. We hope the talks will clearly establish where we currently stand and provide a good starting point.
A second goal is to look further ahead and attempt to establish a plan forward for projects that have a longer time scale for implementation, including a future space mission.
As the working group leader you are not expected to define the plan but to keep the two time scales in mind, and to ensure the discussion addresses the workshop goals. These goals should also be your guidance in terms of the presentation on Friday morning.
Please let us know if you have any comments or questions.
Thanks so much
Science workshop Motivation and Goals
Space Probes of Inflation and Cosmic Origins and their Complementarity with Sub-orbital Experiments in the Next Decade
NASA is funding studies of several Probe class missions, among them is the Probe of Inflation and Cosmic Origins (PICO), a deep polarimetric survey of the entire sky in CMB and nearby frequency bands. The missions will be presented to the 2020 decadal panel. JAXA is conducting a Phase A study of the LiteBIRD mission. This workshop will discuss the science goals of a CMB space mission in the next decade. Such goals include detecting or placing limits on the energy scale of inflation and the physics of quantum gravity, a determination of the mass of the neutrino and constraining the number of light particles in the early Universe, elucidating the nature of dark energy, clarifying the role of dark matter in forming structures, determining the ionization history of the Universe, detecting the structure of galactic magnetic fields over a broad range of angular scales to explain their role in star formation, and creating a legacy survey of the entire sky consisting of thousands of newly-discovered clusters, proto-clusters, and lensed extragalactic sources that will be mined for years.
Sub-orbital experiments are now implementing tens of thousands of detectors, and CMB-S4 is seeking funding to implement hundreds of thousands. We will also discuss the characteristics of space-based and sub-orbital-based data sets, how these data will be used together to extract information on fundamental physics and structure formation and evolution on all scales, and how they will complement other astrophysics data sets. A goal of this workshop is to clarify the case for complementarity as it will be presented to the 2020 decadal panel.