A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Gravitational Lensing Potential from 100 Square Degrees of SPTpol Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a high signal-to-noise measurement of the CMB gravitational lensing potential using SPTpol data, providing a detailed power spectrum and constraints consistent with the DM model, and demonstrating the power of polarization data.

Contribution

First high signal-to-noise CMB lensing map from SPTpol data, with detailed power spectrum and DM model constraints, using polarization and temperature data.

Findings

Lensing potential measured with S/N > 1 for 100 < L < 250.

Primary power spectrum result consistent with DM model.

Lensing hypothesis rejected at 14 sigma with combined temperature and polarization data.

Abstract

We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) gravitational lensing potential using data from the first two seasons of observations with SPTpol, the polarization-sensitive receiver currently installed on the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The observations used in this work cover 100 deg$^2$ of sky with arcminute resolution at 150 GHz. Using a quadratic estimator, we make maps of the CMB lensing potential from combinations of CMB temperature and polarization maps. We combine these lensing potential maps to form a minimum-variance (MV) map. The lensing potential is measured with a signal-to-noise ratio of greater than one for angular multipoles between $100< L <250$. This is the highest signal-to-noise mass map made from the CMB to date and will be powerful in cross-correlation with other tracers of large-scale structure. We calculate the power spectrum of the lensing potential for each estimator, and we report the value of the MV power spectrum between $100< L <2000$ as our primary result. We constrain the ratio of the spectrum to a fiducial $\Lambda$CDM model to be $A_{\rm MV}=0.92 \pm 0.14 {\rm\, (Stat.)} \pm 0.08 {\rm\, (Sys.)}$. Restricting ourselves to polarized data only, we find $A_{\rm POL}=0.92 \pm 0.24 {\rm\, (Stat.)} \pm 0.11 {\rm\, (Sys.)}$. This measurement rejects the hypothesis of no lensing at $5.9 \sigma$ using polarization data alone, and at $14 \sigma$ using both temperature and polarization data.