A Measurement of Secondary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies From the 2500 Square-Degree SPT-Sz Survey

Abstract

We present measurements of secondary cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and cosmic infrared background (CIB) fluctuations using data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) covering the complete 2540 deg 2 SPT-SZ survey area. Data in the three SPT-SZ frequency bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz, are used to produce six angular power spectra (three single-frequency auto-spectra and three cross-spectra) covering the multipole range 2000 < < 11000 (angular scales 5 θ 1 ). These are the most precise measurements of the angular power spectra at > 2500 at these frequencies. The main contributors to the power spectra at these angular scales and frequencies are the primary CMB, CIB, thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects (tSZ and kSZ), and radio galaxies. We include a constraint on the tSZ power from a measurement of the tSZ bispectrum from 800 deg 2 of the SPT-SZ survey. We measure the tSZ power at 143 GHz to be D tSZ 3000 = 4.08 +0.58 −0.67 µK 2 and the kSZ power to be D kSZ 3000 = 2.9 ± 1.3 µK 2 . The data prefer positive kSZ power at 98.1% CL. We measure a correlation coefficient of ξ = 0.113 +0.057 −0.054 between sources of tSZ and CIB power, with ξ < 0 disfavored at a confidence level of 99.0%. The constraint on kSZ power can be interpreted as an upper limit on the duration of reionization. When the post-reionization homogeneous kSZ signal is accounted for, we find an upper limit on the duration ∆z < 5.4 at 95% CL.

Cosmic reionization after Planck

“…From the evolution of volume filling factor QHII for HII regions, one can see that reionization is almost completed (QHII ∼ 1) around 5.8 z 8.5 (2-σ limits) for Planck model. The mean ionized fraction evolves rapidly in 5.8 z 10.6, in good agreement with other recent works (George et al 2015;Robertson et al 2015), whereas the mean WMAP model favors a relatively gradual or extended reionization (spanning 5.8 z 13). This is reflected in the evolution of the neutral hydrogen fraction xHI: the mean value for Planck model goes from xHI ∼ 0.8 to xHI ∼ 10 −4 between z = 10.6 (z = 13 for WMAP model) and z = 5.8.…”

CMB Polarization B-mode Delensing with SPTpol and Herschel

“…In the temperature skies we add several components: the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ), the clustered and unclustered components of the CIB (dusty sources), and radio point sources (active galactic nuclei; AGNs). The tSZ component is modeled by a tSZ power spectrum template taken from Shaw et al (George et al 2015). We neglect the correlation between these CIB components at 150 and 95 GHz and the simulated CIB map at 500 μm.…”

“…Power from unclustered point sources is by definition flat in C ℓ , so p=2 for unclustered sources. With the adopted threshold for point source masking of 50mJy at 150 GHz, the residual dusty sources power spectrum amplitudes are m = A 9 K (Mocanu et al 2013;George et al 2015). We need the foreground component in the temperature maps to properly account for T/E → B leakage that is removed through the convolutional cleaning step of the power spectrum analysis of the B-mode map (Section 4.4).…”

Relieving tensions related to the lensing of the cosmic microwave background temperature power spectra

“…These measurements were calibrated using WMAP 7yr data. A more recent analysis from the complete ∼2500 deg 2 area of the SPT-SZ survey is presented in George et al (2015), dubbed SPT high2014 hereafter. In this later release, cross spectra cover a somewhat broader range, between 2000 and 13000.…”

“…We thus prefer to use Reichardt et al (2012) dataset as a baseline in our analyses, with free calibration parameters to match other datasets. We have checked that all results presented in this paper are stable when switching to George et al (2015), in which case we have to set strict priors on recalibration parameters owing to the form of the associated covariance matrix.…”