An Improved Measurement of the Secondary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies from the SPT-SZ + SPTpol Surveys


Abstract in English

We report new measurements of millimeter-wave power spectra in the angular multipole range $2000 le ell le 11,000$ (angular scales $5^prime gtrsim theta gtrsim 1^prime$). By adding 95 and 150,GHz data from the low-noise 500 deg$^2$ SPTpol survey to the SPT-SZ three-frequency 2540 deg$^2$ survey, we substantially reduce the uncertainties in these bands. These power spectra include contributions from the primary cosmic microwave background, cosmic infrared background, radio galaxies, and thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effects. The data favor a thermal SZ (tSZ) power at 143,GHz of $D^{rm tSZ}_{3000} = 3.42 pm 0.54~ mu {rm K}^2$ and a kinematic SZ (kSZ) power of $D^{rm kSZ}_{3000} = 3.0 pm 1.0~ mu {rm K}^2$. This is the first measurement of kSZ power at $ge 3,sigma$. We study the implications of the measured kSZ power for the epoch of reionization, finding the duration of reionization to be $Delta z_{re} = 1.0^{+1.6}_{-0.7}$ ($Delta z_{re}< 4.1$ at 95% confidence), when combined with our previously published tSZ bispectrum measurement.

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