BeyondPlanck XIV. Polarized foreground emission between 30 and 70 GHz

Using the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) and WMAP data within the global Bayesian BEYONDPLANCK framework, we constrained the polarized foreground emission between 30 and 70 GHz. We combined, for the first time, full-resolution Planck LFI time-ordered data with low-resolution WMAP sky maps at 33, 40, and 61 GHz. The spectral parameters were fit with a likelihood defined at the native resolution of each frequency channel. This analysis represents the first implementation of true multi-resolution component separation applied to CMB observations for both amplitude and spectral energy distribution (SED) parameters. For the synchrotron emission, we approximated the SED as a power-law in frequency and we find that the low signal-to-noise ratio of the current data strongly limits the number of free parameters that can be robustly constrained. We partitioned the sky into four large disjoint regions (High Latitude; Galactic Spur; Galactic Plane; and Galactic Center), each associated with its own power-law index. We find that the High Latitude region is prior-dominated, while the Galactic Center region is contaminated by residual instrumental systematics. The two remaining regions appear to be signal-dominated, and for these we derive spectral indices of βsSpur = −3.17 ± 0.06 and βsPlane = −3.03 ± 0.07, which is in good agreement with previous results. For the thermal dust emission, we assumed a modified blackbody model and we fit a single power-law index across the full sky. We find βd = 1.64 ± 0.03, which is slightly steeper than the value reported in Planck HFI data, but still statistically consistent at the 2σ confidence level.