A Measurement of Arcminute Anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background with the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Array

Creators: Sharp, Matthew K.; Marrone, Daniel P.; Carlstrom, John E.; Culverhouse, Thomas; Greer, Christopher; Hawkins, David; Hennessy, Ryan; Joy, Marshall; Lamb, James W.; Leitch, Erik M.; Loh, Michael; Miller, Amber; Mroczkowski, Tony; Muchovej, Stephen; Pryke, Clem; Woody, David

Abstract

We present 30 GHz measurements of the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) obtained with the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Array. The measurements are sensitive to arcminute angular scales, where secondary anisotropy from the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZE) is expected to dominate. For a broad bin centered at multipole 4066, we find 67^(+77)_(–50) μK^2; of which 26 ± 5 μK^2 is the expected contribution from primary CMB anisotropy and 80 ± 54 μK^2 is the expected contribution from undetected radio sources. These results imply an upper limit of 155 μK^2 (95% CL) on the secondary contribution to the anisotropy in our maps. This level of SZE anisotropy power is consistent with expectations based on recent determinations of the normalization of the matter power spectrum, i.e., σ_8 ~ 0.8.

Additional Information

© 2010 American Astronomical Society. Received 2009 January 27; accepted 2010 February 17; published 2010 March 17. We thank John Cartwright, Ben Reddall, and Marcus Runyan for their significant contributions to the construction and commissioning of the SZA instrument. We thank the staff of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory and CARMA for their outstanding support. We also thank Tom Crawford, Kyle Dawson, Nils Halverson, Bill Holzapfel, Ryan Keisler, Tom Plagge, Tony Readhead, and Jonathan Sievers for helpful discussions, and David S. Meier and Eric Greisen for assistance with the VLA data reduction. We gratefully acknowledge the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Chicago for funding to construct the SZA. The operation of the SZA is supported by NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences through grant AST-0604982. Partial support is provided by NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-0114422 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, and by NSF grants AST-0507545 and AST-05-07161 to Columbia University. A.M. acknowledges support from a Sloan Fellowship, S.M. from an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship, and C.G., S.M., and M.S. from NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Facilities: SZA, VLA

Attached Files

Published - Sharp2010p7482Astrophys_J.pdf

Files

Sharp2010p7482Astrophys_J.pdf

Files (309.8 kB)

Name	Size	Download all
Sharp2010p7482Astrophys_J.pdf md5:a6c130e5517fe5739cdf309efdc81699	309.8 kB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes