Measurements of E-Mode Polarization and Temperature-E-Mode Correlation in the Cosmic Microwave Background from 100 Square Degrees of SPTpol Data

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_ℓ = ℓ(ℓ + 1) C_ℓ/2π < 0.40 µK^2 at ℓ = 3000, indicating that future EE measurements will not be limited by power from unclustered point sources in the multipole range ℓ < 3600, and possibly much higher in ℓ.

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