Published September 1, 2015 | Version v1
Journal article

A measurement of the cosmic microwave background gravitational lensing potential from 100 square degrees of SPTPOL data

  • 1. Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 (United States)
  • 2. Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 Rue University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T8 (Canada)
  • 3. Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3XQ (United Kingdom)
  • 4. University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 (United States)
  • 5. Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 (United States)
  • 6. NIST Quantum Devices Group, 325 Broadway Mailcode 817.03, Boulder, CO 80305 (United States)
  • 7. School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban (South Africa)
  • 8. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (United States)
  • 9. Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)

Description

We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) gravitational lensing potential using data from the first two seasons of observations with SPTpol, the polarization-sensitive receiver currently installed on the South Pole Telescope. The observations used in this work cover 100 deg2 of sky with arcminute resolution at 150 GHz. Using a quadratic estimator, we make maps of the CMB lensing potential from combinations of CMB temperature and polarization maps. We combine these lensing potential maps to form a minimum-variance (MV) map. The lensing potential is measured with a signal-to-noise ratio of greater than one for angular multipoles between 100 < L < 250. This is the highest signal-to-noise mass map made from the CMB to date and will be powerful in cross-correlation with other tracers of large-scale structure. We calculate the power spectrum of the lensing potential for each estimator, and we report the value of the MV power spectrum between 100 < L < 2000 as our primary result. We constrain the ratio of the spectrum to a fiducial ΛCDM model to be AMV = 0.92 ± 0.14 (Stat.) ± 0.08 (Sys.). Restricting ourselves to polarized data only, we find APOL = 0.92 ± 0.24 (Stat.) ± 0.11 (Sys.). This measurement rejects the hypothesis of no lensing at 5.9 σ using polarization data alone, and at 14 σ using both temperature and polarization data.

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/810/1/50

Additional details

Identifiers

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Astrophysical Journal
Journal Volume
810
Journal Issue
1
Series
Since 2009, the country of publication for this journal is the UK.
Journal Page Range
[16 p.]
ISSN
0004-637X
CODEN
ASJOAB

INIS

Country of Publication
United Kingdom
Country of Input or Organization
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
INIS RN
51044953
Subject category
S79: ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY;
Descriptors DEI
COSMOLOGY; GHZ RANGE 100-1000; GRAVITATIONAL LENSES; HYPOTHESIS; MASS; MULTIPOLES; POLARIZATION; RELICT RADIATION; RESOLUTION; SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO; SPECTRA; TELESCOPES; UNIVERSE
Descriptors DEC
DIMENSIONLESS NUMBERS; ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION; FREQUENCY RANGE; GHZ RANGE; LENSES; MICROWAVE RADIATION; RADIATIONS