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Published June 20, 2015 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

A Measurement of Gravitational Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background by Galaxy Clusters Using Data from the South Pole Telescope

Abstract

Clusters of galaxies are expected to gravitationally lens the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and thereby generate a distinct signal in the CMB on arcminute scales. Measurements of this effect can be used to constrain the masses of galaxy clusters with CMB data alone. Here we present a measurement of lensing of the CMB by galaxy clusters using data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT). We develop a maximum likelihood approach to extract the CMB cluster lensing signal and validate the method on mock data. We quantify the effects on our analysis of several potential sources of systematic error and find that they generally act to reduce the best-fit cluster mass. It is estimated that this bias to lower cluster mass is roughly 0.85σ in units of the statistical error bar, although this estimate should be viewed as an upper limit. We apply our maximum likelihood technique to 513 clusters selected via their Sunyaev–Zeldovich (SZ) signatures in SPT data, and rule out the null hypothesis of no lensing at 3.1σ. The lensing-derived mass estimate for the full cluster sample is consistent with that inferred from the SZ flux: M_(200,lens)=0.83_(-0.37)^(+0.38)M_(200,SZ) (68% C.L., statistical error only).

Additional Information

© 2015 American Astronomical Society. Received 2015 January 6; accepted 2015 May 12; published 2015 June 22. The South Pole Telescope is supported by the National Science Foundation through grant PLR-1248097. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-1125897 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant GBMF 947. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. 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 supported in part by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through grant NSF PHY-1125897 and an endowment from the Kavli Foundation and its founder Fred Kavli. The McGill group acknowledges funding from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Research Chairs program, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. M. Dobbs acknowledges support from an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. S. Dodelson is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, including grant DE-FG02-95ER40896. T. de Haan is supported by a Miller Research Fellowship. Cluster studies at SAO are supported by NSF grant AST-1009649.

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Submitted - 1412.7521v2.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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