Wavelet reconstruction of E and B modes for CMB polarization and cosmic shear analyses

Abstract We present new methods for mapping the curl-free (E-mode) and divergence-free (B-mode) components of spin 2 signals using spin directional wavelets. Our methods are equally applicable to measurements of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the shear of galaxy shapes due to weak gravitational lensing. We derive pseudo- and pure wavelet estimators, where E-B mixing arising due to incomplete sky coverage is suppressed in wavelet space using scale- and orientation-dependent masking and weighting schemes. In the case of the pure estimator, ambiguous modes (which have vanishing curl and divergence simultaneously on the incomplete sky) are also cancelled. On simulations, we demonstrate the improvement (i.e. reduction in leakage) provided by our wavelet space estimators over standard harmonic space approaches. Our new methods can be directly interfaced in a coherent and computationally efficient manner with component separation or feature extraction techniques that also exploit wavelets.