A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND DAMPING TAIL FROM THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY

By K. Story, C. Reichardt, Z. Hou, R. Keisler, K. Aird, B. Benson, L. Bleem, J. Carlstrom, C. Chang, Hsiao-mei Cho and 40 more. 2012

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature power spectrum using data from the recently completed South Pole Telescope Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (SPT-SZ) survey. This measurement is made from observations of 2540 deg2 of sky with arcminute resolution at 150 GHz, and improves upon previous measurements using the SPT by tripling the sky area. We report CMB temperature anisotropy power over the multipole range 650 < ℓ < 3000. We fit the SPT bandpowers, combined with the 7 yr Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP7) data, with a six-parameter ΛCDM cosmological model and find that the two datasets are consistent and well fit by the model. Adding SPT measurements significantly improves ΛCDM parameter constraints; in particular, the constraint on θ s tightens by a factor of 2.7. The impact of gravitational lensing is detected at 8.1σ, the most significant detection to date. This sensitivity of the SPT+WMAP7 data to lensing by large-scale structure at low redshifts allows us to constrain the mean curvature of the observable universe with CMB data alone to be . Using the SPT+WMAP7 data, we measure the spectral index of scalar fluctuations to be ns = 0.9623 ± 0.0097 in the ΛCDM model, a 3.9σ preference for a scale-dependent spectrum with ns < 1. The SPT measurement of the CMB damping tail helps break the degeneracy that exists between the tensor-to-scalar ratio r and ns in large-scale CMB measurements, leading to an upper limit of r < 0.18 (95% C.L.) in the ΛCDM+r model. Adding low-redshift measurements of the Hubble constant (H 0) and the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature to the SPT+WMAP7 data leads to further improvements. The combination of SPT+WMAP7+H 0+BAO constrains ns = 0.9538 ± 0.0081 in the ΛCDM model, a 5.7σ detection of ns < 1, and places an upper limit of r < 0.11 (95% C.L.) in the ΛCDM+r model. These new constraints on ns and r have significant implications for our understanding of inflation, which we discuss in the context of selected single-field inflation models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a373c2828e49f3cf3153f5bf1c816d531bba8c55

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

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).”
GALAXY CLUSTERS DISCOVERED VIA THE SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT IN THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2014, background): “The survey covers a contiguous region from 20h to 7h in right ascension (R.A.) and −65 to −40◦ in declination (see, e.g., Figure 1 in Story et al. 2013) and was mapped to depths of approximately 40, 18, and 70 μK-arcmin at 95, 150, and 220 GHz respectively.”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM GALAXY CLUSTERS IN THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2016, methodology): “We find good agreement with the parameter constraints obtained from the WtG project, as well as CMB constraints from either WMAP9+S13 (Hinshaw et al. 2013; Story et al. 2013) or Planck+WP (Planck Collaboration et al. 2014a).”
HUBBLE FRONTIER FIELDS FIRST COMPLETE CLUSTER DATA: FAINT GALAXIES AT z ∼ 5–10 FOR UV LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS AND COSMIC REIONIZATION (2014, background): “…be τe = 0.091 +0.013 −0.014 (Planck Collaboration et al. 2013) from the combination of the Planck temperature power spectrum, the WMAP polarization low-multipole (l ≤ 23) likelihood (Bennett et al. 2013), and the high-resolution groundbased CMB data (e.g., Reichardt et al. 2012, Story et al. 2013).”
A 2.4% DETERMINATION OF THE LOCAL VALUE OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT (2016, background): “A lower value of 68.1±0.7 is given by Aubourg et al. (2015) for WMAP9, BAO, and high-redshift SNe—but this neglects SPT, which pulls toward higher H0 (Story et al. 2013; Addison et al. 2015).”
A MEASUREMENT OF SECONDARY COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPIES FROM THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2014, background): “The specific field locations and extents can be found in Table 1 of Story et al. (2013), hereafter S13.”
QUANTIFYING DISCORDANCE IN THE 2015 PLANCK CMB SPECTRUM (2015, methodology): “The SPT-only values provided by Story et al. (2013)8 are also shown.”
A tale of two modes: neutrino free-streaming in the early universe (2017, background): “[106, 107]) and are bound to improve in the near future, the presence of significant foregrounds at l & 2500 in the temperature spectrum might partially nullify the gain of going to smaller scales.”
Elucidating ΛCDM: Impact of Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Measurements on the Hubble Constant Discrepancy (2017, methodology): “…Telescope polarization-sensitive receiver (ACTPol; Thornton et al. 2016; Louis et al. 2017; Sherwin et al. 2016) two-season survey, covering 548 deg2, and the 2500 deg2 South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel’dovich survey (SPT-SZ; Carlstrom et al. 2011; Story et al. 2013; van Engelen et al. 2012).”
THE 1% CONCORDANCE HUBBLE CONSTANT (2014, background): “The current ACT temperature and lensing likelihoods are discussed in Das et al. (2013) and Dunkley et al. (2013), while the most recent SPT likelihoods are discussed in Story et al. (2013) and van Engelen et al. (2012).”
Inflation and String Theory (2014, methodology): “Together with the measurements of the CMB damping tail by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) [97,98] and the South Pole Telescope (SPT) [99, 100] this provides a beautiful picture of the first seven acoustic peaks of the CMB power spectrum.”
Measurements of the Temperature and E-mode Polarization of the CMB from 500 Square Degrees of SPTpol Data (2017, unknown): “Ground-based experiments have measured the temperature power spectrum of small patches of the sky to arcminute scales with high precision (Story et al. 2013; Das et al. 2014; George et al. 2015).”