We describe the design of a new polarization sensitive receiver, spt-3g, for the 10-meter South Pole Telescope (spt). The spt-3g receiver will deliver a factor of ∼20 improvement in mapping speed over the current receiver, spt-pol. The sensitivity of the spt-3g receiver will enable the advance from statistical detection of B-mode polarization anisotropy power to high signal-to-noise measurements of the individual modes, i.e., maps. This will lead to precise (∼0.06 eV) constraints on the sum of neutrino masses with the potential to directly address the neutrino mass hierarchy. It will allow a separation of the lensing and inflationary B-mode power spectra, improving constraints on the amplitude and shape of the primordial signal, either through spt-3g data alone or in combination with bicep2/keck, which is observing the same area of sky. The measurement of small-scale temperature anisotropy will provide new constraints on the epoch of reionization. Additional science from the spt-3g survey will be significantly enhanced by the synergy with the ongoing optical Dark Energy Survey (des), including: a 1% constraint on the bias of optical tracers of large-scale structure, a measurement of the differential Doppler signal from pairs of galaxy clusters that will test General Relativity on ∼200 Mpc scales, and improved cosmological constraints from the abundance of clusters of galaxies.

We measure the cross-correlation between the galaxy density in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification data and the lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as reconstructed with the Planck satellite and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). When using the DES main galaxy sample over the full redshift range 0.2 < z phot < 1.2, a cross-correlation signal is detected at 6σ and 4σ with SPT and Planck respectively. We then divide the DES galaxies into five photometric redshift bins, finding significant (>2σ) detections in all bins. Comparing to the fiducial Planck cosmology, we find the redshift evolution of the signal matches expectations, although the amplitude is consistently lower than predicted across redshift bins. We test for possible systematics that could affect our result and find no evidence for significant contamination. Finally, we demonstrate how these measurements can be used to constrain the growth of structure across cosmic time. We find the data are fit by a model in which the amplitude of structure in the z < 1.2 universe is 0.73 ± 0.16 times as large as predicted in the ΛCDM Planck cosmology, a 1.7σ deviation.

We present a cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing map produced from a linear combination of South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Planck temperature data. The 150 GHz temperature data from the 2500 deg 2 SPT-SZ survey is combined with the Planck 143 GHz data in harmonic space to obtain a temperature map that has a broader ℓ coverage and less noise than either individual map. Using a quadratic estimator technique on this combined temperature map, we produce a map of the gravitational lensing potential projected along the line of sight. We measure the auto-spectrum of the lensing potential ff C L , and compare it to the theoretical prediction for a ΛCDM cosmology consistent with the Planck 2015 data set, finding a best-fit amplitude of . The null hypothesis of no lensing is rejected at a significance of 24σ. One important use of such a lensing potential map is in cross-correlations with other dark matter tracers. We demonstrate this cross-correlation in practice by calculating the cross-spectrum, between the SPT+Planck lensing map andWide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) galaxies. We fitwith a, L 0 , and b fixed, and find h = =0.04 , which is marginally lower, but in good agreement with h = f -+ 1.000.02 , the best-fit amplitude for the cross-correlation of Planck-2015 CMB lensing and WISE galaxies over ∼67% of the sky. The lensing potential map presented here will be used for cross-correlation studies with the Dark Energy Survey, whose footprint nearly completely covers the SPT 2500 deg 2 field.

We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing potential using 500 deg 2 of 150 GHz data from the SPTpol receiver on the South Pole Telescope. The lensing potential is reconstructed with signal-to-noise per mode greater than unity at lensing multipoles L 250, using a quadratic estimator on a combination of CMB temperature and polarization maps. We report measurements of the lensing potential power spectrum in the multipole range of 100 < L < 2000 from sets of temperature-only (T), polarization-only (POL), and minimum-variance (MV) estimators. We measure the lensing amplitude by taking the ratio of the measured spectrum to the expected spectrum from the best-fit ΛCDM model to the Planck 2015 TT+lowP+lensing dataset. For the minimumvariance estimator, we find A MV = 0.944 ± 0.058 (Stat.) ± 0.025 (Sys.); restricting to only polarization data, we find A POL = 0.906 ± 0.090 (Stat.) ± 0.040 (Sys.). Considering statistical uncertainties alone, this is the most precise polarization-only lensing amplitude constraint to date (10.1 σ), and is more precise than our temperature-only constraint. We perform null tests and consistency checks and find no evidence for significant contamination. †

A detection of excess cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization on large scales allows the possibility of measuring not only the amplitude of these fluctuations but also their scale dependence, which can be parametrized as the tensor tilt n T . Measurements of this scale dependence will be hindered by the secondary B-mode polarization anisotropy induced by gravitational lensing. Fortunately, these contaminating B modes can be estimated and removed with a sufficiently good estimate of the intervening gravitational potential and a good map of CMB E-mode polarization. We present forecasts for how well these gravitational lensing B modes can be removed, assuming that the lensing potential can be estimated either internally from CMB data or using maps of the cosmic infrared background (CIB) as a tracer. We find that CIB maps are as effective as CMB maps for delensing at the noise levels of the current generation of CMB experiments, while the CMB maps themselves will ultimately be best for delensing at polarization noise below ∆ P =1 µK-arcmin. At this sensitivity level, CMB delensing will be able to measure n T to an accuracy of 0.02 or better, which corresponds to the tensor tilt predicted by the consistency relation for single-field slow-roll models of inflation with r = 0.2. However, CIB-based delensing will not be sufficient for constraining n T in simple inflationary models.