A Measurement of Secondary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies with Two Years of South Pole Telescope Observations

Article

Reichardt, C. L., Shaw, L., Zahn, O., Aird, K. A., Benson, B. A., Bleem, L. E., Carlstrom, J. E., Chang, C. L., Cho, H. M., Crawford, T. M., Crites, A. T., de Haan, T., Dobbs, M. A., Dudley, J., George, E. M., Halverson, N. W., Holder, G. P., Holzapfel, W. L., Hoover, S., Hou, Z., Hrubes, J. D., Joy, M., Keisler, R., Knox, L., Lee, A. T. et al. 2012. "A Measurement of Secondary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies with Two Years of South Pole Telescope Observations." The Astrophysical Journal, 755 70. https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/755/1/70.

We present the first three-frequency South Pole Telescope (SPT) cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectra. The band powers presented here cover angular scales 2000 ², and set an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power to be less than 2.8 ?K² at 95% confidence. When a correlation between the thermal SZ and CIB is allowed, we constrain a linear combination of thermal and kinetic SZ power: D ^tSZ ₃₀₀₀ 0.5D ₃₀₀₀ ^kSZ = 4.60 ± 0.63 ?K², consistent with earlier measurements. We use the measured thermal SZ power and an analytic, thermal SZ model calibrated with simulations to determine ?₈ = 0.807 ± 0.016. Modeling uncertainties involving the astrophysics of the intracluster medium rather than the statistical uncertainty in the measured band powers are the dominant source of uncertainty on ?₈. We also place an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power produced by patchy reionization; a companion paper uses these limits to constrain the reionization history of the universe.