A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing Potential and Power Spectrum from 500 deg² of SPTpol Temperature and Polarization Data

• Published in: The Astrophysical Journal
• Main Authors: Wu, W. L. K., Moran, C. Corbett, Crites, A. T., Padin, S.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Astronomical Society 2019
• Subjects: cosmology: cosmic background radiation – large-scale structure of the universe; South Pole; Kavli; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab4186

We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background lensing potential using 500 deg² of 150 GHz data from the SPTpol receiver on the South Pole Telescope. The lensing potential is reconstructed with signal-to-noise per mode greater than unity at lensing multipoles L ≾ 250, using a quadratic estimator on a combination of cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization maps. We report measurements of the lensing potential power spectrum in the multipole range of 100 < L < 2000 from sets of temperature-only (T), polarization-only (POL), and minimum-variance (MV) estimators. We measure the lensing amplitude by taking the ratio of the measured spectrum to the expected spectrum from the best-fit Λ cold dark matter model to the Planck 2015 TT + low P + lensing data set. For the minimum-variance estimator, we find A_(MV) = 0.944±0.058(Stat.)±0.025(Sys.) restricting to only polarization data, we find A_(POL) = 0.906±0.090(Stat.)±0.040(Sys.). Considering statistical uncertainties alone, this is the most precise polarization-only lensing amplitude constraint to date (10.1σ) and is more precise than our temperature-only constraint. We perform null tests and consistency checks and find no evidence for significant contamination. © 2019 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2019 May 14; revised 2019 July 31; accepted 2019 September 3; published 2019 October 14. The authors would like to acknowledge helpful comments from Chang Feng and Srinivasan Raghunathan on the manuscript. The South Pole Telescope program is supported by the National Science Foundation through grant PLR-1248097. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-0114422 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through grant GBMF No. 947 to the University of Chicago. This work is also supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. W.L.K.W. is supported in part by the Kavli Institute for ...