The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r) = 0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensorto-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources a .

We present new arcminute-resolution maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropy from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, using data taken from 2013–2016 at 98 and 150 GHz. The maps cover more than 17,000 deg2, the deepest 600 deg2 with noise levels below 10μK-arcmin. We use the power spectrum derived from almost 6,000 deg2 of these maps to constrain cosmology. The ACT data enable a measurement of the angular scale of features in both the divergence-like polarization and the temperature anisotropy, tracing both the velocity and density at last-scattering. From these one can derive the distance to the last-scattering surface and thus infer the local expansion rate, H 0. By combining ACT data with large-scale information from WMAP we measure H 0=67.6± 1.1 km/s/Mpc, at 68% confidence, in excellent agreement with the independently-measured Planck satellite estimate (from ACT alone we find H 0=67.9± 1.5 km/s/Mpc). The ΛCDM model provides a good fit to the ACT data, and we find no evidence for deviations: both the spatial curvature, and the departure from the standard lensing signal in the spectrum, are zero to within 1σ; the number of relativistic species, the primordial Helium fraction, and the running of the spectral index are consistent with ΛCDM predictions to within 1.5–2.2σ. We compare ACT, WMAP, and Planck at the parameter level and find good consistency; we investigate how the constraints on the correlated spectral index and baryon density parameters readjust when adding CMB large-scale information that ACT does not measure. The DR4 products presented here will be publicly released on the NASA Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis.

We present the temperature and polarization angular power spectra of the CMB measured by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) from 5400 deg2 of the 2013–2016 survey, which covers >15000 deg2 at 98 and 150 GHz. For this analysis we adopt a blinding strategy to help avoid confirmation bias and, related to this, show numerous checks for systematic error done before unblinding. Using the likelihood for the cosmological analysis we constrain secondary sources of anisotropy and foreground emission, and derive a “CMB-only” spectrum that extends to ℓ=4000. At large angular scales, foreground emission at 150 GHz is ∼1% of TT and EE within our selected regions and consistent with that found by Planck. Using the same likelihood, we obtain the cosmological parameters for ΛCDM for the ACT data alone with a prior on the optical depth of τ=0.065±0.015. ΛCDM is a good fit. The best-fit model has a reduced χ2 of 1.07 (PTE=0.07) with H 0=67.9±1.5 km/s/Mpc. We show that the lensing BB signal is consistent with ΛCDM and limit the celestial EB polarization angle to ψ P  =−0.07̂±0.09̂. We directly cross correlate ACT with Planck and observe generally good agreement but with some discrepancies in TE. All data on which this analysis is based will be publicly released.

We present a catalog of 68 galaxy clusters, of which 19 are new discoveries, detected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZ) at 148 GHz in the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) survey on the celestial equator. With this addition, the ACT collaboration has reported a total of 91 optically confirmed, SZ detected clusters. The 504 square degree survey region includes 270 square degrees of overlap with SDSS Stripe 82, permitting the confirmation of SZ cluster candidates in deep archival optical data. The subsample of 48 clusters within Stripe 82 is estimated to be 90% complete for M 500c > 4.5 × 10 14 M ⊙ and redshifts 0.15 < z < 0.8. While a full suite of matched filters is used to detect the clusters, the sample is studied further through a "Profile Based Amplitude Analysis" using a statistic derived from a single filter at a fixed θ 500 = 5. ′ 9 angular scale. This new approach incorporates the cluster redshift along with prior information on the cluster pressure profile to fix the relationship between the cluster characteristic size (R 500 ) and the integrated Compton parameter (Y 500 ). We adopt a one-parameter family of "Universal Pressure Profiles" (UPP) with associated scaling laws, derived from X-ray measurements of nearby clusters, as a baseline model. Three additional models of cluster physics are used to investigate a range of scaling relations beyond the UPP prescription. Assuming a concordance cosmology, the UPP scalings are found to be nearly identical to an adiabatic model, while a model incorporating non-thermal pressure better matches dynamical mass measurements and masses from the South Pole Telescope. A high signal to noise ratio subsample of 15 ACT clusters with complete optical follow-up is used to obtain cosmological constraints. We demonstrate, using fixed scaling relations, how the constraints depend on the assumed gas model if only SZ measurements are used, and show that constraints from SZ data are limited by uncertainty in the scaling relation parameters rather than sample size or measurement uncertainty. We next add in seven clusters from the ACT Southern survey, including their dynamical mass measurements, which are based on galaxy velocity dispersions and thus are independent of the gas physics. In combination with WMAP7 these data simultaneously constrain the scaling relation and cosmological parameters, yielding 68% confidence ranges described by σ 8 = 0.829 ± 0.024 and Ω m = 0.292 ± 0.025. We consider these results in the context of constraints from CMB and other cluster studies. The constraints arise mainly due to the inclusion of the dynamical mass information and do not require strong priors on the SZ scaling relation parameters. The results include marginalization over a 15% bias in dynamical masses relative to the true halo mass. In an extension to ΛCDM that incorporates non-zero neutrino mass density, we combine our data with WMAP7, Baryon Acoustic Oscillation data, and Hubble constant measurements to constrain the sum of the neutrino mass species to be ν m ν < 0.29 eV (95% con...

We present constraints on cosmological and astrophysical parameters from high-resolution microwave background maps at 148 GHz and 218 GHz made by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in three seasons of observations from 2008 to 2010. A model of primary cosmological and secondary foreground parameters is fit to the map power spectra and lensing deflection power spectrum, including contributions from both the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect and the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect, Poisson and correlated anisotropy from unresolved infrared sources, radio sources, and the correlation between the tSZ effect and infrared sources. The power ℓ 2 C ℓ /2π of the thermal SZ power spectrum at 148 GHz is measured to be 3.4 ± 1.4 µK 2 at ℓ = 3000, while the corresponding amplitude of the kinematic SZ power spectrum has a 95% confidence level upper limit of 8.6 µK 2. Combining ACT power spectra with the WMAP 7-year temperature and polarization power spectra, we find excellent consistency with the LCDM model. We constrain the number of effective relativistic degrees of freedom in the early universe to be N eff = 2.79 ± 0.56, in agreement with the canonical value of N eff = 3.046 for three massless neutrinos. We constrain the sum of the neutrino masses to be Σm ν < 0.39 eV at 95% confidence when combining ACT and WMAP 7-year data with BAO and Hubble constant measurements. We constrain the amount of primordial helium to be Y p = 0.225 ± 0.034, and measure no variation in the fine structure constant α since recombination, with α/α 0 = 1.004 ± 0.005. We also find no evidence for any running of the scalar spectral index, dn s /d ln k = −0.004 ± 0.012.