No Arabic abstract
The lensing power spectrum from cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps will be measured with unprecedented precision with upcoming experiments, including upgrades to ACT and SPT. Achieving significant improvements in cosmological parameter constraints, such as percent level errors on sigma_8 and an uncertainty on the total neutrino mass of approximately 50 meV, requires percent level measurements of the CMB lensing power. This necessitates tight control of systematic biases. We study several types of biases to the temperature-based lensing reconstruction signal from foreground sources such as radio and infrared galaxies and the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect from galaxy clusters. These foregrounds bias the CMB lensing signal due to their non-Gaussian nature. Using simulations as well as some analytical models we find that these sources can substantially impact the measured signal if left untreated. However, these biases can be brought to the percent level if one masks galaxies with fluxes at 150 GHz above 1 mJy and galaxy clusters with masses above M_vir = 10^14 M_sun. To achieve such percent level bias, we find that only modes up to a maximum multipole of l_max ~ 2500 should be included in the lensing reconstruction. We also discuss ways to minimize additional bias induced by such aggressive foreground masking by, for example, exploring a two-step masking and in-painting algorithm.
We present a method to measure the small-scale matter power spectrum using high-resolution measurements of the gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). To determine whether small-scale structure today is suppressed on scales below 10 kiloparsecs (corresponding to M < 10^9 M_sun), one needs to probe CMB-lensing modes out to L ~ 35,000, requiring a CMB experiment with about 20 arcsecond resolution or better. We show that a CMB survey covering 4,000 square degrees of sky, with an instrumental sensitivity of 0.5 uK-arcmin at 18 arcsecond resolution, could distinguish between cold dark matter and an alternative, such as 1 keV warm dark matter or 10^(-22) eV fuzzy dark matter with about 4-sigma significance. A survey of the same resolution with 0.1 uK-arcmin noise could distinguish between cold dark matter and these alternatives at better than 20-sigma significance; such high-significance measurements may also allow one to distinguish between a suppression of power due to either baryonic effects or the particle nature of dark matter, since each impacts the shape of the lensing power spectrum differently. CMB temperature maps yield higher signal-to-noise than polarization maps in this small-scale regime; thus, systematic effects, such as from extragalactic astrophysical foregrounds, need to be carefully considered. However, these systematic concerns can likely be mitigated with known techniques. Next-generation CMB lensing may thus provide a robust and powerful method of measuring the small-scale matter power spectrum.
We present a new analytical method to calculate the small angle CMB temperature angular power spectrum due to cosmic (super-)string segments. In particular, using our method, we clarify the dependence on the intercommuting probability $P$. We find that the power spectrum is dominated by Poisson-distributed string segments. The power spectrum for a general value of $P$ has a plateau on large angular scales and shows a power-law decrease on small angular scales. The resulting spectrum in the case of conventional cosmic strings is in very good agreement with the numerical result obtained by Fraisse et al.. Then we estimate the upper bound on the dimensionless tension of the string for various values of $P$ by assuming that the fraction of the CMB power spectrum due to cosmic (super-)strings is less than ten percents at various angular scales up to $ell=2000$. We find that the amplitude of the spectrum increases as the intercommuting probability. As a consequence, strings with smaller intercommuting probabilities are found to be more tightly constrained.
We present a semi-analytical method to investigate the systematic effects and statistical uncertainties of the calculated angular power spectrum when incomplete spherical maps are used. The computed power spectrum suffers in particular a loss of angular frequency resolution, which can be written as delta_l ~ pi/gamma_max, where gamma_max is the effective maximum extent of the partial spherical maps. We propose a correction algorithm to reduce systematic effects on the estimated C_l, as obtained from the partial map projection on the spherical harmonic Ylm(l,m) basis. We have derived near optimal bands and weighting functions in l-space for power spectrum calculation using small maps, and a correction algorithm for partially masked spherical maps that contain information on the angular correlations on all scales.
We present a simple approximation that can speed up the computation of the mode-coupling matrices, which are usually the bottleneck for computing unbiased angular power spectra, as well as their associated covariance matrices, of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization anisotropies. The approximation results in the speed up of the MASTER algorithm by more than an order of magnitude with very little loss of precision. We demonstrate the performance on simulations of forthcoming cosmic microwave background surveys such as the Simons Observatory and CMB-S4 for a wide variety of survey window functions.
In this paper, we present results from the complete set of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation temperature anisotropy observations made with the Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver (ACBAR) operating at 150 GHz. We include new data from the final 2005 observing season, expanding the number of detector-hours by 210% and the sky coverage by 490% over that used for the previous ACBAR release. As a result, the band-power uncertainties have been reduced by more than a factor of two on angular scales encompassing the third to fifth acoustic peaks as well as the damping tail of the CMB power spectrum. The calibration uncertainty has been reduced from 6% to 2.1% in temperature through a direct comparison of the CMB anisotropy measured by ACBAR with that of the dipole-calibrated WMAP5 experiment. The measured power spectrum is consistent with a spatially flat, LambdaCDM cosmological model. We include the effects of weak lensing in the power spectrum model computations and find that this significantly improves the fits of the models to the combined ACBAR+WMAP5 power spectrum. The preferred strength of the lensing is consistent with theoretical expectations. On fine angular scales, there is weak evidence (1.1 sigma) for excess power above the level expected from primary anisotropies. We expect any excess power to be dominated by the combination of emission from dusty protogalaxies and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (SZE). However, the excess observed by ACBAR is significantly smaller than the excess power at ell > 2000 reported by the CBI experiment operating at 30 GHz. Therefore, while it is unlikely that the CBI excess has a primordial origin; the combined ACBAR and CBI results are consistent with the source of the CBI excess being either the SZE or radio source contamination.