Seminar
The small scale angular anisotropy at 145 GHz as seen by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope

Abstract

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has been observing the southern sky in the millimeter range with an angular resolution at the arc-minute level. An analysis of 228 square degrees observed at 148 GHz along a stripe centered at declination -53 degrees reveals the presence of the Silk damping tail in the temperature angular power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This decaying tail becomes truncated by a rising spectrum at scales corresponding to few arcmins (l ~ 3000) whose origin is compatible with a unclustered population of unresolved point sources and some residual anisotropy due to Compton scattering of CMB photons off free electrons (the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect). Comparisons with other observations and constraints on different components giving rise to this secondary spectrum are discussed.