English

Improved constraints on cosmic microwave background secondary anisotropies from the complete 2008 South Pole Telescope data

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-03-17 v2

Abstract

We report measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum from the complete 2008 South Pole Telescope (SPT) data set. We analyze twice as much data as the first SPT power spectrum analysis, using an improved cosmological parameter estimator which fits multi-frequency models to the SPT 150 and 220220\,GHz bandpowers. We find an excellent fit to the measured bandpowers with a model that includes lensed primary CMB anisotropy, secondary thermal (tSZ) and kinetic (kSZ) Sunyaev-Zel'dovich anisotropies, unclustered synchrotron point sources, and clustered dusty point sources. In addition to measuring the power spectrum of dusty galaxies at high signal-to-noise, the data primarily constrain a linear combination of the kSZ and tSZ anisotropy contributions at 150150\,GHz and =3000\ell=3000: D3000tSZ+0.5D3000kSZ=4.5±1.0μK2D^{tSZ}_{3000} + 0.5\,D^{kSZ}_{3000} = 4.5\pm 1.0 \,\mu{\rm K}^2. The 95% confidence upper limits on secondary anisotropy power are D3000tSZ<5.3μK2D^{tSZ}_{3000} < 5.3\,\mu{\rm K}^2 and D3000kSZ<6.5μK2D^{kSZ}_{3000} < 6.5\,\mu{\rm K}^2. We also consider the potential correlation of dusty and tSZ sources, and find it incapable of relaxing the tSZ upper limit. These results increase the significance of the lower than expected tSZ amplitude previously determined from SPT power spectrum measurements. We find that models including non-thermal pressure support in groups and clusters predict tSZ power in better agreement with the SPT data. Combining the tSZ power measurement with primary CMB data halves the statistical uncertainty on σ8\sigma_8. However, the preferred value of σ8\sigma_8 varies significantly between tSZ models. Improved constraints on cosmological parameters from tSZ power spectrum measurements require continued progress in the modeling of the tSZ power.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1012.4788,
  title  = {Improved constraints on cosmic microwave background secondary anisotropies from the complete 2008 South Pole Telescope data},
  author = {E. Shirokoff and C. L. Reichardt and L. Shaw and M. Millea and P. A. R. Ade and K. A. Aird and B. A. Benson and L. E. Bleem and J. E. Carlstrom and C. L. Chang and H. M. Cho and T. M. Crawford and A. T. Crites and T. de Haan and M. A. Dobbs and J. Dudley and E. M. George and N. W. Halverson and G. P. Holder and W. L. Holzapfel and J. D. Hrubes and M. Joy and R. Keisler and L. Knox and A. T. Lee and E. M. Leitch and M. Lueker and D. Luong-Van and J. J. McMahon and J. Mehl and S. S. Meyer and J. J. Mohr and T. E. Montroy and S. Padin and T. Plagge and C. Pryke and J. E. Ruhl and K. K. Schaffer and H. G. Spieler and Z. Staniszewski and A. A. Stark and K. Story and K. Vanderlinde and J. D. Vieira and R. Williamson and O. Zahn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1012.4788},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Minor additions in response to referee; results unchanged. 27 pages, 16 figures. Submitted to ApJ