A Detailed Description of the CamSpec Likelihood Pipeline and a Reanalysis of the Planck High Frequency Maps

TL;DR

This paper details the CamSpec likelihood pipeline for analyzing Planck CMB data, demonstrating its robustness and consistency with the standard cosmological model, and providing refined constraints on cosmological parameters.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive description of the CamSpec likelihood method and reanalyzes Planck high frequency maps, confirming the robustness of the LCDM model and refining cosmological parameter estimates.

Findings

The six-parameter LCDM model fits Planck data well.

No significant internal tensions in Planck TT, TE, EE spectra.

Planck data show no strong evidence for lensing amplitude >1 or positive spatial curvature.

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed description of the CamSpec likelihood which has been used to analyse Planck temperature and polarization maps of the cosmic microwave background since the first Planck data release. We have created a number of likelihoods using a range of Galactic sky masks and different methods of temperature foreground cleaning. Our most powerful likelihood uses 80 percent of the sky in temperature and polarization. Our results show that the six-parameter LCDM cosmology provides an excellent fit to the Planck data. There is no evidence for statistically significant internal tensions in the Planck TT, TE and EE spectra computed for different frequency combinations. We present evidence that the tendencies for the Planck temperature power spectra to favour a lensing amplitude A_L>1 and positive spatial curvature are caused by statistical fluctuations in the temperature power spectra. Using our statistically most powerful likelihood, we find that the A_L parameter differs from unity at no more than the 2.2 sigma level. We find no evidence for anomalous shifts in cosmological parameters with multipole range. In fact, we show that the combined TTTEEE likelihood over the restricted multipole range 2-800 gives cosmological parameters for the base LCDM cosmology that are very close to those derived from the full multipole range 2-2500. We present revised constraints on a few extensions of the base LCDM cosmology, focussing on the sum of neutrino masses, number of relativistic species and the tensor-scalar ratio. The results presented here show that the Planck data are remarkably consistent between detector-sets, frequencies and sky area. We find no evidence in our analysis that cosmological parameters determined from the CamSpec likelihood are affected to any significant degree by systematic errors in the Planck data (abridged).