No abstract

No abstract

We present the first three-frequency South Pole Telescope (SPT) cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectra. The band powers presented here cover angular scales 2000 < < 9400 in frequency bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. At these frequencies and angular scales, a combination of the primary CMB anisotropy, thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects, radio galaxies, and cosmic infrared background (CIB) contributes to the signal. We combine Planck/HFI and SPT data at 220 GHz to constrain the amplitude and shape of the CIB power spectrum and find strong evidence for non-linear clustering. We explore the SZ results using a variety of cosmological models for the CMB and CIB anisotropies and find them to be robust with one exception: allowing for spatial correlations between the thermal SZ effect and CIB significantly degrades the SZ constraints. Neglecting this potential correlation, we find the thermal SZ power at 150 GHz and = 3000 to be 3.65 ± 0.69 µK 2 , and set an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power to be less than 2.8 µK 2 at 95% confidence. When a correlation between the thermal SZ and CIB is allowed, we constrain a linear combination of thermal and kinetic SZ power: D tSZ 3000 + 0.5D kSZ 3000 = 4.60 ± 0.63 µK 2 , consistent with earlier measurements. We use the measured thermal SZ power and an analytic, thermal SZ model calibrated with simulations to determine σ 8 = 0.807 ± 0.016. Modeling uncertainties involving the astrophysics of the intracluster medium rather than the statistical uncertainty in the measured band powers are the dominant source of uncertainty on σ 8 . We also place an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power produced by patchy reionization; a companion paper uses these limits to constrain the reionization history of the Universe.

We present a catalog of 224 galaxy cluster candidates, selected through their Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect signature in the first 720 deg 2 of the South Pole Telescope (SPT) survey. This area was mapped with the SPT in the 2008 and 2009 austral winters to a depth of ∼ 18 µK CMB -arcmin at 150 GHz; 550 deg 2 of it was also mapped to ∼ 44 µK CMB -arcmin at 95 GHz. Based on optical imaging of all candidates and near-infrared imaging of the majority of candidates, we have found optical and/or infrared counterparts for 158 clusters. Of these, 135 were first identified as clusters in SPT data, including 117 new discoveries reported in this work. This catalog triples the number of confirmed galaxy clusters discovered through the SZ effect. We report photometrically derived (and in some cases spectroscopic) redshifts for confirmed clusters and redshift lower limits for the remaining candidates. The catalog extends to high redshift with a median redshift of z = 0.55 and maximum redshift of z = 1.37. Forty-five of the clusters have counterparts in the ROSAT bright or faint source catalogs from which we estimate X-ray fluxes. Based on simulations, we expect the catalog to be nearly 100% complete above M 500 ≈ 5 × 10 14 M h −1 70 at z 0.6. There are 121 candidates detected at signal-to-noise greater than five, at which the catalog purity is measured to be 95%. From this highpurity subsample, we exclude the z < 0.3 clusters and use the remaining 100 candidates to improve cosmological constraints following the method presented by Benson et al. (2011). Adding the cluster data to CMB+BAO+H 0 data leads to a preference for non-zero neutrino masses while only slightly reducing the upper limit on the sum of neutrino masses to m ν < 0.38 eV (95% CL). For a spatially flat wCDM cosmological model, the addition of this catalog to the CMB+BAO+H 0 +SNe results yields σ 8 = 0.807 ± 0.027 and w = −1.010 ± 0.058, improving the constraints on these parameters by a factor of 1.4 and 1.3, respectively. The larger cluster catalog presented in this work leads to slight improvements in cosmological constraints from those presented by Benson et al. (2011). These cosmological constraints are currently limited by uncertainty in the cluster mass calibration, not the size or quality of the cluster catalog. A multi-wavelength observation program to improve the cluster mass calibration will make it possible to realize the full potential of the final 2500 deg 2 SPT cluster catalog to constrain cosmology.

We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature power spectrum using data from the recently completed South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SPT-SZ) survey. This measurement is made from observations of 2540 deg 2 of sky with arcminute resolution at 150 GHz, and improves upon previous measurements using the SPT by tripling the sky area. We report CMB temperature anisotropy power over the multipole range 650 < < 3000. We fit the SPT bandpowers, combined with the 7 yr Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP7) data, with a six-parameter ΛCDM cosmological model and find that the two datasets are consistent and well fit by the model. Adding SPT measurements significantly improves ΛCDM parameter constraints; in particular, the constraint on θ s tightens by a factor of 2.7. The impact of gravitational lensing is detected at 8.1σ , the most significant detection to date. This sensitivity of the SPT+WMAP7 data to lensing by largescale structure at low redshifts allows us to constrain the mean curvature of the observable universe with CMB data alone to be Ω k = −0.003 +0.014 −0.018 . Using the SPT+WMAP7 data, we measure the spectral index of scalar fluctuations to be n s = 0.9623 ± 0.0097 in the ΛCDM model, a 3.9σ preference for a scale-dependent spectrum with n s < 1. The SPT measurement of the CMB damping tail helps break the degeneracy that exists between the tensor-to-scalar ratio r and n s in large-scale CMB measurements, leading to an upper limit of r < 0.18 (95% C.L.) in the ΛCDM+r model. Adding low-redshift measurements of the Hubble constant (H 0 ) and the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature to the SPT+WMAP7 data leads to further improvements. The combination of SPT+WMAP7+H 0 +BAO constrains n s = 0.9538 ± 0.0081 in the ΛCDM model, a 5.7σ detection of n s < 1, and places an upper limit of r < 0.11 (95% C.L.) in the ΛCDM+r model. These new constraints on n s and r have significant implications for our understanding of inflation, which we discuss in the context of selected single-field inflation models.