Measurements of E-Mode Polarization and Temperature-E-Mode Correlation in the Cosmic Microwave Background from 100 Square Degrees of SPTpol Data
Ade, P. A. R.; Chiang, H. C.; Hanson, D.; Bleem, L. E.; Stark, A. A.; George, E. M.; Reichardt, C. L.; Aird, K. A.; Benson, B. A.; Carlstrom, J. E.; Chang, C. L.; Cho, H. -M.; Crawford, T. M.; Crites, A. T.; de Haan, T.; Dobbs, M. A.; Halverson, N. W.; Holder, G. P.; Holzapfel, W. L.; Hou, Z.; Hrubes, J. D.; Keisler, R.; Knox, L.; Lee, A. T.; Leitch, E. M.; Luong-Van, D.; McMahon, J. J.; Mehl, J.; Meyer, S. S.; Montroy, T. E.; Padin, S.; Pryke, C.; Ruhl, J. E.; Schaffer, K. K.; Story, K. T.; Vanderlinde, K.; Vieira, J. D.; Zahn, O.; Li, D.; Tucker, C.; Hoover, S.; Natoli, T.; Bender, A. N.; Austermann, J. E.; Beall, J. A.; Hilton, G. C.; Hubmayr, J.; Harrington, N.; Sayre, J. T.; Irwin, K. D.; Henning, J. W.; Citron, R.; Everett, W.; Gallicchio, J.; Gao, J.; Gilbert, A.; Huang, N.; Liang, C.; Mocanu, L.; Nibarger, J. P.; Novosad, V.; Saliwanchik, B. R.; Smecher, G.; Wang, G.; Whitehorn, N.; Yefremenko, V.
United States, United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, Australia
Abstract
We present measurements of E-mode polarization and temperature-E-mode correlation in the cosmic microwave background using data from the first season of observations with SPTpol, the polarization-sensitive receiver currently installed on the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The observations used in this work cover 100 {{deg }2} of sky with arcminute resolution at 150 GHz. We report the E-mode angular auto-power spectrum (EE) and the temperature-E-mode angular cross-power spectrum (TE) over the multipole range 500 < ℓ ≤ 5000. These power spectra improve on previous measurements in the high-ℓ (small-scale) regime. We fit the combination of the SPTpol power spectra, data from Planck, and previous SPT measurements with a six-parameter ΛCDM cosmological model. We find that the best-fit parameters are consistent with previous results. The improvement in high-ℓ sensitivity over previous measurements leads to a significant improvement in the limit on polarized point-source power: after masking sources brighter than 50 mJy in unpolarized flux at 150 GHz, we find a 95% confidence upper limit on unclustered point-source power in the EE spectrum of {{D}\ell }=\ell (\ell +1){{C}\ell }/2π \lt 0.40 μ {{K}2} at \ell =3000, indicating that future EE measurements will not be limited by power from unclustered point sources in the multipole range \ell \lt 3600, and possibly much higher in \ell .