IMPROVED MEASUREMENTS OF THE TEMPERATURE AND POLARIZATION OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND FROM QUaD

By The QUaD collaboration M. L. Brown, P. Ade, J. Bock, M. Bowden, G. Cahill, P. G. Castro, S. Church, T. Culverhouse, R. Friedman, K. Ganga and 34 more. 2009

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We present an improved analysis of the final data set from the QUaD experiment. Using an improved technique to remove ground contamination, we double the effective sky area and hence increase the precision of our cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum measurements by ∼30% versus that previously reported. In addition, we have improved our modeling of the instrument beams and have reduced our absolute calibration uncertainty from 5% to 3.5% in temperature. The robustness of our results is confirmed through extensive jackknife tests, and by way of the agreement that we find between our two fully independent analysis pipelines. For the standard six-parameter ΛCDM model, the addition of QUaD data marginally improves the constraints on a number of cosmological parameters over those obtained from the WMAP experiment alone. The impact of QUaD data is significantly greater for a model extended to include either a running in the scalar spectral index, or a possible tensor component, or both. Adding both the QUaD data and the results from the Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver experiment, the uncertainty in the spectral index running is reduced by ∼25% compared to WMAP alone, while the upper limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio is reduced from r < 0.48 to r < 0.33 (95% c.l.). This is the strongest limit on tensors to date from the CMB alone. We also use our polarization measurements to place constraints on parity-violating interactions to the surface of last scattering, constraining the energy scale of Lorentz violating interactions to <1.5 × 10−43 GeV (68% c.l.). Finally, we place a robust upper limit on the strength of the lensing B-mode signal. Assuming a single flat band power between ℓ = 200 and ℓ = 2000, we constrain the amplitude of B-modes to be <0.57 μK2 (95% c.l.).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c7e48605694d386dcecd201a443d5885f10fb84

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Citations in the corpus

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: temperature and gravitational lensing power spectrum measurements from three seasons of data (2013, background): “Rapid progress in measurements of the damping tail of the power spectrum has been achieved over a span of a few years by a number of experiments, notably the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI; [38]), Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver (ACBAR; [32]), QUEST at DASI (QUaD; [6, 14]), the Atacama C”
THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS FROM THE 2008 POWER SPECTRUM (2010, methodology): “Measurements at higher resolution have been made by a set of complementary balloon and ground-based experiments (e.g., Jones et al. 2006; Brown et al. 2009; Reichardt et al. 2009; Sievers et al. 2009).”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND B-MODE POLARIZATION POWER SPECTRUM AT SUB-DEGREE SCALES WITH POLARBEAR (2014, background): “These measurements are consistent with a single source for both the temperature and E-mode signals – the adiabatic density fluctuations in the primordial universe (Barkats et al. 2014; Leitch et al. 2005; Montroy et al. 2006; Brown et al. 2009; quiet Collaboration 2011, 2012; Bennett et al. 2013).”
A MEASUREMENT OF GRAVITATIONAL LENSING OF THE MICROWAVE BACKGROUND USING SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE DATA (2012, methodology): “The cosmological parameters are given by the best-fit model for WMAP7 together with the high-multipole measurements of the ACBAR (Reichardt et al. 2009) and QUaD (Brown et al. 2009; Friedman et al. 2009) experiments as found on the LAMBDA website30.”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: The Receiver and Instrumentation (2010, unknown): “Current measurements of the angular power spectrum from tenths of a degree to all sky have provided estimates of cosmological paramters and have begun to quantify the big bang process (e.g., Komatsu et al. (2009), Brown et al. (2009), Chiang et al. (2009), Sievers et al. (2009)).”
GALAXY CLUSTERS SELECTED WITH THE SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT FROM 2008 SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS (2010, methodology): “It explores a spatially flat ΛCDM parameter space based on the “CMBall” data set: WMAP five-year + QUaD (Brown et al. 2009) + ACBAR (Reichardt et al. 2009) + SPT (power spectrum measurements with ASZ as a free parameter; L10).”
Cosmological parameters from large scale structure - geometric versus shape information (2010, methodology): “Since large scale structure data by themselves are not able to break all the parameter degeneracies of our cosmological models, we complement the power spectrum/BAO data with a compilation of measurements of the CMB temperature and polarisation anisotropies, consisting of WMAP 7-year [6], ACBAR [7],”
SEVEN-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: POWER SPECTRA AND WMAP-DERIVED PARAMETERS (2010, result): “Note that other experiments, such as QUaD (Brown et al. 2009), find the EE spectrum to be consistent with the prediction of the best-fit model.”
SEVEN-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: SKY MAPS, SYSTEMATIC ERRORS, AND BASIC RESULTS (2010, methodology): “Additionally, when augmented by the small scale CMB anisotropy measurements by ACBAR (Reichardt et al. 2009) and QUaD (Brown et al. 2009), this result yields a greater that 3σ detection of the primordial Helium abundance, YHe = 0.326± 0.075, using CMB data alone.”
MEASUREMENT OF COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND POLARIZATION POWER SPECTRA FROM TWO YEARS OF BICEP DATA (2009, background): “…peaks in the polarization spectra have been measured to high precision in both the T E spectrum (Piacentini et al. 2006; Nolta et al. 2009) and, more recently, directly in the EE spectrum (Pryke et al. 2009; Brown et al. 2009), providing further support for our basic understanding of CMB physics.”
MEASUREMENTS OF SECONDARY COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPIES WITH THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE (2009, methodology): “…(CMB) has been well-characterized on angular scales larger than a few arcminutes (Jones et al. 2006; Reichardt et al. 2009a; Nolta et al. 2009; Brown et al. 2009), providing stringent tests of cosmological theory and strong evidence for the ΛCDM cosmological model (Hinshaw et al. 2009;…”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND DAMPING TAIL FROM THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2012, methodology): “In the past few years, there have been several increasingly precise measurements of the CMB damping tail, including the Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver (ACBAR, Reichardt et al. 2009), QUaD (Brown et al. 2009; Friedman et al. 2009), ACT (Das et al. 2011b), and SPT (Keisler et al. 2011, h”
PROBING THE INFLATON: SMALL-SCALE POWER SPECTRUM CONSTRAINTS FROM MEASUREMENTS OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ENERGY SPECTRUM (2012, unknown): “0.1 Mpc−1 (Pearson et al. 2003; Reichardt et al. 2009; Brown et al. 2009; Larson et al. 2011; Hlozek et al. 2011).”