Consistency of cosmic microwave background temperature measurements in three frequency bands in the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ survey

• Published in: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
• Main Authors: Mocanu, L. M., Crawford, T. M., Aylor, K., Benson, B. A., Bleem, L. E., Carlstrom, J. E., Chang, C. L., Cho, H. -M., Chown, R., Crites, A. T., de Haan, T., Dobbs, M. A., Everett, W. B., George, E. M., Halverson, N. W., Harrington, N. L., Henning, J. W., Holder, G. P., Holzapfel, W. L., Hou, Z., Hrubes, J. D., Knox, L., Lee, A. T., Luong-Van, D., Marrone, D. P., McMahon, J. J., Meyer, S. S., Millea, M., Mohr, J. J., Natoli, T., Omori, Y., Padin, S., Pryke, C., Reichardt, C. L., Ruhl, J. E., Sayre, J. T., Schaffer, K. K., Shirokoff, E., Staniszewski, Z., Stark, A. A., Story, K. T., Vanderlinde, K., Vieira, J. D., Williamson, R., Wu, W. L. K.
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: 79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1572452; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1572452; https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2019/07/038

We present an internal consistency test of South Pole Telescope (SPT) measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropy using three-band data from the SPT-SZ survey. These measurements are made from observations of ~ 2500 °2 of sky in three frequency bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. We combine the information from these three bands into six semi-independent estimates of the CMB power spectrum (three single-frequency power spectra and three cross-frequency spectra) over the multipole range 650<ℓ<3000. We subtract an estimate of foreground power from each power spectrum and evaluate the consistency among the resulting CMB-only spectra. We determine that the six foreground-cleaned power spectra are consistent with the null hypothesis, in which the six cleaned spectra contain only CMB power and noise. A fit of the data to this model results in a χ 2 value of 236.3 for 235 degrees of freedom, and the probability to exceed this χ 2 value is 46%.