Parameter Estimation from Improved Measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background from QUaD

Creators: Gupta, S.; Bock, J.; Kovac, J.; Lange, A. E.; Leitch, E.; Orlando, A.; Rusholme, B.; Zemcov, M.

Abstract

We evaluate the contribution of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization spectra to cosmological parameter constraints. We produce cosmological parameters using high-quality CMB polarization data from the ground-based QUaD experiment and demonstrate for the majority of parameters that there is significant improvement on the constraints obtained from satellite CMB polarization data. We split a multi-experiment CMB data set into temperature and polarization subsets and show that the best-fit confidence regions for the ΛCDM six-parameter cosmological model are consistent with each other, and that polarization data reduces the confidence regions on all parameters. We provide the best limits on parameters from QUaD EE/BB polarization data and we find best-fit parameters from the multi-experiment CMB data set using the optimal pivot scale of k_p = 0.013 Mpc^(–1) to be {h^2Ω_c, h^2Ω_b, H_0, A_s, n_s, τ} = {0.113, 0.0224, 70.6, 2.29 × 10^(–9), 0.960, 0.086}.

Additional Information

© 2010 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2009 September 9; accepted 2010 April 29; published 2010 May 26. QUaD is funded by the National Science Foundation in the USA, through grants ANT-0338138, ANT-0338335, & ANT- 0338238, by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the UK, and by the Science Foundation Ireland. P.G.C. acknowledges funding from the Portuguese FCT. S.E.C. acknowledges support from a Stanford Terman Fellowship. J.R.H. acknowledges the support of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship. Y.M. acknowledges support from a SUPA Prize studentship. C.P. acknowledges partial support from the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics through the grant NSF PHY-0114422. E.Y.W. acknowledges receipt of an NDSEG fellowship. M.Z. acknowledges support from a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship.We acknowledge the use of the CAMB (Lewis et al. 2000), CosmoMC (Lewis & Bridle 2002), and HEALPix (G´orski et al. 2005) packages. We acknowledge the use of the Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis (LAMBDA). Support for LAMBDA is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science. This work was performed using the computational facilities of the Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff (ARCCA) Division, Cardiff University.

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