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., Crawford, T., Aylor, K., Benson, B., Bleem, L., Carlstrom, J., Chang, C., Cho, H., Chown, R., Crites, A., de Haan, T., Dobbs, M., Everett, W., George, E., Halverson, N., Harrington, N., Henning, J., Holder, G., Holzapfel, W., Hou, Z., Hrubes, J., Knox, L., Lee, A., Luong-Van, D., Marrone, D., McMahon, J., Meyer, S., Millea, M., Mohr, J., Natoli, T., Omori, Y., Padin, S., Pryke, C., Reichardt, C., Ruhl, J., Sayre, J., Schaffer, K., Shirokoff, E., Staniszewski, Z., Stark, A., Story, K., Vanderlinde, K., Vieira, J., Williamson, R., Wu, W.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0005-1008-0; http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0005-100A-E

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%.