MEASUREMENT OF COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND POLARIZATION POWER SPECTRA FROM TWO YEARS OF BICEP DATA

By H. Chiang, P. Ade, D. Barkats, J. Battle, E. Bierman, J. Bock, C. Dowell, L. Duband, E. Hivon, W. Holzapfel and 18 more. 2009

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (Bicep) is a bolometric polarimeter designed to measure the inflationary B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree angular scales. During three seasons of observing at the South Pole (2006 through 2008), Bicep mapped ∼2% of the sky chosen to be uniquely clean of polarized foreground emission. Here, we present initial results derived from a subset of the data acquired during the first two years. We present maps of temperature, Stokes Q and U, E and B modes, and associated angular power spectra. We demonstrate that the polarization data are self-consistent by performing a series of jackknife tests. We study potential systematic errors in detail and show that they are sub-dominant to the statistical errors. We measure the E-mode angular power spectrum with high precision at 21 ⩽ ℓ ⩽ 335, detecting for the first time the peak expected at ℓ ∼ 140. The measured E-mode spectrum is consistent with expectations from a ΛCDM model, and the B-mode spectrum is consistent with zero. The tensor-to-scalar ratio derived from the B-mode spectrum is r = 0.02+0.31−0.26, or r < 0.72 at 95% confidence, the first meaningful constraint on the inflationary gravitational wave background to come directly from CMB B-mode polarization.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cbda6d0eb6f05cfa5e9d991ca7c668c865af413b

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Citations in the corpus

A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND DAMPING TAIL FROM THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2012, unknown): “The lowest upper limit on r from B-modes is currently r < 0.7 (95% C.L.) from the BICEP experiment (Chiang et al. 2010).”
PRISM (Polarized Radiation Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission): an extended white paper (2013, methodology): “d and sensitive experimental set-ups. Hence it is likely that the status of our knowledge will evolve signiﬁcantly before the launch of PRISM. To date two suborbital experiments QUIET [181] and BICEP [17] have published analyses of their ﬁrst data sets, setting up upper limits on the B-mode power an”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: cosmological parameters from three seasons of data (2013, unknown): “…et al. 2000; Knox & Page 2000; Hanany et al. 2000; Lee et al. 2001; Romeo et al. 2001; Netterﬁeld et al. 2002; Halverson et al. 2002; Kovac et al. 2002; Carlstrom et al. 2003; Pearson et al. 2003; Scott et al. 2003; Benoˆıt et al. 2003; Spergel et al. 2003; Johnson et al. 2007; Chiang et al. 2010).”
Bicep2. II. EXPERIMENT AND THREE-YEAR DATA SET (2014, background): “Its full three-year data set yields the best direct limits to date on inflationary B-modes: r < 0.65 at 95% confidence level (Chiang et al. 2010; Kaufman et al. 2014; Barkats et al. 2014).”
NINE-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETER RESULTS (2012, background): “Several recent experiments are beginning to establish comparable limits from nondetection of B-mode polarization anisotropy, e.g., Chiang et al. (2010) report r < 0.7 (95% CL) from BICEP and the QUIET Collaboration (2012) reports r < 2.8 (95% CL).”
THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS FROM THE 2008 POWER SPECTRUM (2010, methodology): “In Fowler et al. (2010) we assumed a seventh power scaling, with AtSZ ∝ σ 7 8 (Komatsu & Seljak 2002), giving an upper limit of σSZ8 < 0.84 at 95% CL, for AtSZ < 1.6.”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND B-MODE POLARIZATION POWER SPECTRUM AT SUB-DEGREE SCALES WITH POLARBEAR (2014, methodology): “Time Ordered Data to Maps Following Chiang et al. (2010), we construct maps m from detector time streams d, diagonal detector variance estimates N , a time-domain filter F , and pointing matrix A, using (ATN−1A)m = ATN−1Fd .”
SEVEN-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (2010, methodology): “For example, the BBN predicts that the helium abundance is related to the baryon-to-photon ratio, η, and the number of additional neutrino species (or any other additional relativistic degrees of freedom) during the BBN epoch, ∆Nν ≡ Nν−3, as (see equation (11) of Steigman 2008) Yp = 0.2485 + 0.0016[”