Published August 10, 2012 | Version v1
Journal article

A MEASUREMENT OF SECONDARY COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPIES WITH TWO YEARS OF SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS

  • 1. Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
  • 2. Department of Physics, Yale University, P.O. Box 208210, New Haven, CT 06520-8120 (United States)
  • 3. Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, Department of Physics, University of California, and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
  • 4. University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 (United States)
  • 5. Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 (United States)
  • 6. NIST Quantum Devices Group, 325 Broadway Mailcode 817.03, Boulder, CO 80305 (United States)
  • 7. Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 Rue University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T8 (Canada)
  • 8. Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences and Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 (United States)
  • 9. Department of Physics, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616 (United States)

Description

We present the first three-frequency South Pole Telescope (SPT) cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectra. The band powers presented here cover angular scales 2000 < l < 9400 in frequency bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. At these frequencies and angular scales, a combination of the primary CMB anisotropy, thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects, radio galaxies, and cosmic infrared background (CIB) contributes to the signal. We combine Planck/HFI and SPT data at 220 GHz to constrain the amplitude and shape of the CIB power spectrum and find strong evidence for nonlinear clustering. We explore the SZ results using a variety of cosmological models for the CMB and CIB anisotropies and find them to be robust with one exception: allowing for spatial correlations between the thermal SZ effect and CIB significantly degrades the SZ constraints. Neglecting this potential correlation, we find the thermal SZ power at 150 GHz and l = 3000 to be 3.65 ± 0.69 μK2, and set an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power to be less than 2.8 μK2 at 95% confidence. When a correlation between the thermal SZ and CIB is allowed, we constrain a linear combination of thermal and kinetic SZ power: DtSZ3000 + 0.5D3000kSZ = 4.60 ± 0.63 μK2, consistent with earlier measurements. We use the measured thermal SZ power and an analytic, thermal SZ model calibrated with simulations to determine σ8 = 0.807 ± 0.016. Modeling uncertainties involving the astrophysics of the intracluster medium rather than the statistical uncertainty in the measured band powers are the dominant source of uncertainty on σ8. We also place an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power produced by patchy reionization; a companion paper uses these limits to constrain the reionization history of the universe.

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/755/1/70

Additional details

Identifiers

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Astrophysical Journal
Journal Volume
755
Journal Issue
1
Journal Page Range
[23 p.]
ISSN
0004-637X
CODEN
ASJOAB