A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND GRAVITATIONAL LENSING POTENTIAL FROM 100 SQUARE DEGREES OF SPTPOL DATA

• Published in: The Astrophysical journal 2015-09, Vol.810 (1), p.1-16
• Main Authors: Story, K. T., Hanson, D., Ade, P. A. R., Aird, K. A., Austermann, J. E., J. A. Beall, Bender, A. N., Benson, B. A., Bleem, L. E., Carlstrom, J. E., Chang, C. L., Chiang, H. C., Cho, H-M., Citron, R., Crawford, T. M., Crites, A. T., Haan, T. de, Dobbs, M. A., Everett, W., Gallicchio, J., Gao, J., George, E. M., Gilbert, A., Halverson, N. W., Harrington, N., Henning, J. W., Hilton, G. C., Holder, G. P., Holzapfel, W. L., Hoover, S., Hou, Z., Hrubes, J. D., Huang, N., Hubmayr, J., Irwin, K. D., Keisler, R., Knox, L., Lee, A. T., Leitch, E. M., Li, D., Liang, C., Luong-Van, D., McMahon, J. J., Mehl, J., Meyer, S. S., Mocanu, L., Montroy, T. E., Natoli, T., Nibarger, J. P., Novosad, V., Padin, S., Pryke, C., Reichardt, C. L., Ruhl, J. E., Saliwanchik, B. R., Sayre, J. T., Schaffer, K. K., Smecher, G., Stark, A. A., Tucker, C., Vanderlinde, K., Vieira, J. D., Wang, G., Whitehorn, N., Yefremenko, V., Zahn, O.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS; cosmic background radiation; Cosmic microwave background; cosmology: observations; Estimators; Gravitational lenses; large-scale structure of universe; Polarization; Receivers; Seasons; Signal to noise ratio
• ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357; 1538-4357
• DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/810/1/50

ABSTRACT We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) gravitational lensing potential using data from the first two seasons of observations with SPTpol, the polarization-sensitive receiver currently installed on the South Pole Telescope. The observations used in this work cover 100 deg2 of sky with arcminute resolution at 150 GHz. Using a quadratic estimator, we make maps of the CMB lensing potential from combinations of CMB temperature and polarization maps. We combine these lensing potential maps to form a minimum-variance (MV) map. The lensing potential is measured with a signal-to-noise ratio of greater than one for angular multipoles between . This is the highest signal-to-noise mass map made from the CMB to date and will be powerful in cross-correlation with other tracers of large-scale structure. We calculate the power spectrum of the lensing potential for each estimator, and we report the value of the MV power spectrum between as our primary result. We constrain the ratio of the spectrum to a fiducial ΛCDM model to be AMV = 0.92 0.14 (Stat.) 0.08 (Sys.). Restricting ourselves to polarized data only, we find APOL = 0.92 0.24 (Stat.) 0.11 (Sys.). This measurement rejects the hypothesis of no lensing at using polarization data alone, and at using both temperature and polarization data.