Measurement of Arcminute‐Scale Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy with the Berkeley‐Illinois‐Maryland Association Array

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
We report the results of our continued study of arcminute scale anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Array. The survey consists of ten independent fields selected for low infrared dust emission and lack of bright radio point sources. With observations from the Very Large Array (VLA) at 4.8 GHz, we have identified point sources which could act as contaminants in estimates of the CMB power spectrum and removed them in the analysis. Modeling the observed power spectrum with a single flat band power with average multipole of \ell_{eff}=6864, we find dT=14.2^{+4.8}_{-6.0} \mu K at 68% confidence. The signal in the visibility data exceeds the expected contribution from instrumental noise with 96.5% confidence. We have also divided the data into two bins corresponding to different spatial resolutions in the power spectrum. We find dT_1=16.6^{+5.3}_{-5.9} \mu K at 68% confidence for CMB flat band power described by an average multipole of \ell_{eff}=5237 and dT_2<26.5 \mu K at 95% confidence for \ell_{eff}=8748.