The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: CMB polarization at 200 < ℓ < 9000

By S. Naess, M. Hasselfield, J. McMahon, M. Niemack, G. Addison, P. Ade, R. Allison, M. Amiri, Nicholas Battaglia, J. Beall and 68 more. 2014

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and celestial polarization at 146 GHz made with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Polarimeter (ACTPol) in its first three months of observing. Four regions of sky covering a total of 270 square degrees were mapped with an angular resolution of 1.3′. The map noise levels in the four regions are between 11 and 17 μK-arcmin. We present TT, TE, EE, TB, EB, and BB power spectra from three of these regions. The observed E-mode polarization power spectrum, displaying six acoustic peaks in the range 200 < ℓ < 3000, is an excellent fit to the prediction of the best-fit cosmological models from WMAP9+ACT and Planck data. The polarization power spectrum, which mainly reflects primordial plasma velocity perturbations, provides an independent determination of cosmological parameters consistent with those based on the temperature power spectrum, which results mostly from primordial density perturbations. We find that without masking any point sources in the EE data at ℓ < 9000, the Poisson tail of the EE power spectrum due to polarized point sources has an amplitude less than 2.4 μ 2 at ℓ = 3000 at 95% confidence. Finally, we report that the Crab Nebula, an important polarization calibration source at microwave frequencies, has 8.7% polarization with an angle of 150.7̂ ± 0.6̂ when smoothed with a 5′ Gaussian beam.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f6a2f1147e43bceb0cf46e8acbdda0dd87cd702

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• Planck intermediate results: LI. features in the cosmic microwave background temperature power spectrum and shifts in cosmological parameters (2016, unknown): “Although many measurements and analyses of the CMB have been made that have a bearing on agreement with Planck (e.g. Calabrese et al. 2013; Story et al. 2013; Das et al. 2014; Louis et al. 2014; Naess et al. 2014; George et al. 2015), it is impossible here to discuss them all in detail.”
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: two-season ACTPol spectra and parameters (2016, methodology): “As in Naess et al. (2014) we use cylindrical equal area (CEA) pixels of side 0.5′, in equatorial coordinates.”
• Measurements of the Temperature and E-mode Polarization of the CMB from 500 Square Degrees of SPTpol Data (2017, methodology): “Several experiments have now made high-fidelity measurements of E modes and temperature-E-mode correlation (e.g., Planck Collaboration et al. 2016a; Keck Array and BICEP2 Collaborations et al. 2015; Naess et al. 2014; POLARBEAR Collaboration 2014; Louis et al. 2016, C15).”
• The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves (2015, unknown): “Detection through cross-correlation with tracers of the projected potential (see below) was reported by SPTPol (Hanson et al. 2013), POLARBEAR (Ade et al. 2014d), and ACTPol (van Engelen et al. 2015), and then detections in autocorrelation were reported by POLARBEAR (Ade et al. 2014a), BICEP2/Keck (”
• THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: THE POLARIZATION-SENSITIVE ACTPol INSTRUMENT (2016, methodology): “First analyses of Seasons 1 and 2 are presented in Naess et al. (2014) and Louis et al. (in prep).”