A MEASUREMENT OF THE DAMPING TAIL OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND POWER SPECTRUM WITH THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE

By R. Keisler, C. Reichardt, K. Aird, B. Benson, L. Bleem, J. Carlstrom, C. Chang, Hsiao-mei Cho, T. Crawford, A. Crites and 39 more. 2011

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We present a measurement of the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The data consist of 790 deg2 of sky observed at 150 GHz during 2008 and 2009. Here we present the power spectrum over the multipole range 650 < ℓ < 3000, where it is dominated by primary CMB anisotropy. We combine this power spectrum with the power spectra from the seven-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data release to constrain cosmological models. We find that the SPT and WMAP data are consistent with each other and, when combined, are well fit by a spatially flat, ΛCDM cosmological model. The SPT+WMAP constraint on the spectral index of scalar fluctuations is ns = 0.9663 ± 0.0112. We detect, at ∼5σ significance, the effect of gravitational lensing on the CMB power spectrum, and find its amplitude to be consistent with the ΛCDM cosmological model. We explore a number of extensions beyond the ΛCDM model. Each extension is tested independently, although there are degeneracies between some of the extension parameters. We constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio to be r < 0.21 (95% CL) and constrain the running of the scalar spectral index to be dns/dln k = −0.024 ± 0.013. We strongly detect the effects of primordial helium and neutrinos on the CMB; a model without helium is rejected at 7.7σ, while a model without neutrinos is rejected at 7.5σ. The primordial helium abundance is measured to be Yp = 0.296 ± 0.030, and the effective number of relativistic species is measured to be Neff = 3.85 ± 0.62. The constraints on these models are strengthened when the CMB data are combined with measurements of the Hubble constant and the baryon acoustic oscillation feature. Notable improvements include ns = 0.9668 ± 0.0093, r < 0.17 (95% CL), and Neff = 3.86 ± 0.42. The SPT+WMAP data show a mild preference for low power in the CMB damping tail, and while this preference may be accommodated by models that have a negative spectral running, a high primordial helium abundance, or a high effective number of relativistic species, such models are disfavored by the abundance of low-redshift galaxy clusters.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/90ec469563281ee9af3df9a0b0691aea8ae5616e

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Citations in the corpus

GALAXY CLUSTERS DISCOVERED VIA THE SUNYAEV–ZEL’DOVICH EFFECT IN THE FIRST 720 SQUARE DEGREES OF THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE SURVEY (2012, methodology): “In addition to the cluster data, some MCMCs include CMB data from WMAP7 and SPT (Komatsu et al. 2011; Keisler et al. 2011).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological implications of the full shape of the clustering wedges in the data release 10 and 11 galaxy samples (2013, methodology): “We extend this data set using the high- CMB measurements from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT; Das et al. 2013) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT; Keisler et al. 2011; Reichardt et al. 2012; Story et al. 2013).”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: temperature and gravitational lensing power spectrum measurements from three seasons of data (2013, methodology): “To correct for this, we adjust the Poisson point source component of our best fit model to match the masking level used in [24].”
A MEASUREMENT OF SECONDARY COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPIES FROM THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2014, background): “In response to the results of L10, which showed very low tSZ power compared to the predictions of the Sehgal model, Shaw et al. (2010) investigated the impact of cluster astrophysics on the tSZ power spectrum, using a modified version of the Bode et al. (2009) model for gas physics.”
Cosmology and astrophysics from relaxed galaxy clusters - II. Cosmological constraints (2014, methodology): “…and the Planck satellite (1-year release, including WMAP polarization data; Planck Collaboration 2013b), as well as high-multipole data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT; Das et al. 2013) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT; Keisler et al. 2011; Reichardt et al. 2012; Story et al. 2013).”
CMB at 2 × 2 order: the dissipation of primordial acoustic waves and the observable part of the associated energy release (2012, methodology): “The effect of Silk damping today is observed by CMB anisotropy experiments (Larson et al. 2011; Reichardt et al. 2009; Keisler et al. 2011; Dunkley et al. 2011).”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM GALAXY CLUSTERS IN THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2016, methodology): “A Gaussian random field with a power spectrum equal to the CMB power spectrum calculated using the best-fit ΛCDM parameters from Keisler et al. (2011).”
The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, background): “Gravitational lensing of the CMB and its cross-correlation with galaxy lensing (Blanchard and Schneider, 1987; Cole and Efstathiou, 1989; Bernardeau, 1997; Linder, 1990; Seljak, 1996; Metcalf and Silk, 1997; Zaldarriaga and Seljak, 1998; Hu and Okamoto, 2002; Sherwin et al., 2011; van Engelen et al.”