Constraints on a Stochastic Background of Primordial Magnetic Fields with WMAP and South Pole Telescope data

TL;DR

This paper uses combined WMAP and South Pole Telescope data to set new upper limits on primordial magnetic fields, improving previous constraints by nearly a factor of two, and discusses future prospects with Planck data.

Contribution

It provides the first combined analysis of WMAP and SPT data to constrain primordial magnetic fields, achieving tighter bounds than previous studies.

Findings

Upper limit of 3.5 nG on magnetic field amplitude at 1 Mpc scale

SPT data up to 000 improve constraints by nearly a factor of two

Forecasts for Planck data indicate further potential improvements

Abstract

We constrain a stochastic background of primordial magnetic fields (PMF) by its contribution to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy angular power spectrum with the combination of WMAP 7 year and South Pole Telescope (SPT) data. The contamination in the SPT data by unresolved point sources and by the Sunyaev Zeldovich (SZ) effect due to galaxy clusters has been taken into account as modelled by the SPT collaboration. With this combination of WMAP 7 yr and SPT data, we constrain the amplitude Gaussian smoothed over 1 Mpc scale of a stochatic background of non-helical PMF to $B_{\rm 1 Mpc}<3.5$ nG at 95% confidence level. Our analysis shows that SPT data up to $\ell=3000$ bring an improvement of almost a factor two with respect to results with previous CMB high-$\ell$ data. We then discuss the forecasted impact from unresolved points sources and SZ effect for {\sc Planck} capabilities in constraining PMF.