The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum at 148 and 218 GHz from the 2008 Southern Survey

TL;DR

This paper reports precise measurements of the CMB power spectrum at multiple frequencies, confirming multiple acoustic peaks, detecting lensing effects, and demonstrating the ability to recover faint Galactic signals, thus testing the DM model.

Contribution

First high-resolution measurements of the CMB power spectrum at 148 and 218 GHz from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, including detection of lensing and Galactic dust.

Findings

Detection of the second through seventh acoustic peaks.

Evidence for gravitational lensing at 2.8c3 level.

Identification of Galactic dust contamination.

Abstract

We present measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum made by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope at 148 GHz and 218 GHz, as well as the cross-frequency spectrum between the two channels. Our results clearly show the second through the seventh acoustic peaks in the CMB power spectrum. The measurements of these higher-order peaks provide an additional test of the {\Lambda}CDM cosmological model. At l > 3000, we detect power in excess of the primary anisotropy spectrum of the CMB. At lower multipoles 500 < l < 3000, we find evidence for gravitational lensing of the CMB in the power spectrum at the 2.8{\sigma} level. We also detect a low level of Galactic dust in our maps, which demonstrates that we can recover known faint, diffuse signals.