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Toward a Mass-Limited Catalog of Galaxy Clusters from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope

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Toward a Mass-Limited Catalog of Galaxy Clusters from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Toward a Mass-Limited Catalog of Galaxy Clusters from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Adam Douglas Hincks ADISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS ADVISER:LYMAN A. PAGE,JR. SEPTEMBER 2009 c Copyright by Adam Douglas Hincks, 2009. All rights reserved. Abstract The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) is a six meter observatory in the Andes of northern Chile. It is currently in its third season of operation, observing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with about 1000 detectors each at 148 GHz, 218 GHz, and 277 GHz. Capable of producing high sensitivity maps of the CMB at arcminute resolution, the ACT will contribute to our knowledge of cosmology by constraining the parameters describing the early universe as well as by studying its subsequent evolution. One of the more important tools for investigating the latter will be the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect, by which large clusters of galaxies leave distinct imprints in the CMB, the strength of which is nearly independent of redshift. In this dissertation, we present maps of the first SZ clusters to be detected by the ACT, showing that we are beginning to reach our objective of creating a large, mass-limited catalog of clusters for probing the growth of structure in the universe. Extensive data analysis is required to produce our CMB maps, so, after describing the telescope itself, much of the dissertation is devoted to presenting some of the mapmaking elements. In particular, we have developed a pipeline which specializes at removing atmospheric contamination from the data to produce small, clean maps suitable for cluster analysis. It has also been used to make high precision beam maps, crucial for interpreting all of the measurements made by the ACT. iii iv The heavens catalog the glory of God, And the expanse makes known the work of his hands. v vi Acknowledgments An famous Oxford don believed that the relationship between a professor and his proteg´ e´ should not to be that of schoolmaster and pupil, but rather that of collaborators. “The student is, or ought to be, a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can. From the very beginning the two ought to be fellow students.”1 I have been fortunate to have many outstanding “fellow students” during my academic career and it is a pleasure to offer my deep gratitude to them here. My interest in cosmology matured as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, much of it due to the enthusiasm and cheerfulness of Barth Netterfield, in whose lab I worked for two sum- mers. Dick Bond and Carlo Contaldi were also important influences during my work with them at CITA. When I arrived at Princeton, I was fairly certain I wanted to work with Lyman Page. My ex- perience over five years has confirmed the wisdom of this initial inclination. He has given me the latitude to pursue my own interests within the bounds of our research, but at the same time has been eminently available, given insightful guidance, and always offered encouragement when most needed. I particularly thank him and his wife Lisa for their hospitality during the last few weeks of my work on this dissertation. Formally I have had one doctoral advisor, but informally I have had several, at Princeton and beyond. I have very much enjoyed working with Mark Devlin, Joe Fowler, Mark Halpern, Norm Jarosik, Jeff Klein, Michele Limon, and Suzanne Staggs, all of whom have taught me a great deal. Their collective experience coupled with generous personalities have been indispensable to my growth as a researcher. I have had the good luck of having wonderful officemates over the years: Asad Aboobaker, Ryan Fisher, Judy Lau, Toby Marriage, Mike Niemack, and Eric Switzer. Additionally, there are many members of our project with whom I have worked closely: Paula Aguirre, John William Appel, Elia Battistelli, Sudeep Das, Jo Dunkley, Rolando Dunner-Planella,¨ Tom Essinger-Hileman, Amir Hajian, Matt Hasselfield, Madhuri Kaul, Danica Marsden, Mike “Dr. No” Nolta, Lucas Parker, Jon Sievers, David Spergel, Omelan Stryzak, Dan Swetz, Bob Thornton, and Yue Zhao. I have spent a lot of quality time at close quarters with most of these fine people in the field, and can truly say that I enjoy the company of each and every one of them. From the wider collaboration I have benefited from interactions with Viviana Acquaviva, Man- dana Amiri, Ben Brown, Bryce Burger, Jay Chervenak, Sarah Denny, Simon Dicker, Randy Doriese, Carlos Hernandez-Monteagudo,´ Gene Hilton, Renee´ Hlozek, Anson Hook, Kevin Huffenberger, David Hughes, Jack Hughes, Polo Infante, Kent Irwin, Raul Jiminez, Jean-Baptiste Juin, Arthur Kosowsky, Yen-Tin Lin, Bob Margolis, Krista Martocci, Robert Lupton the Good, Felipe Menanteau, Harvey Moseley, Bruce Partridge, Beth Reid, Audrey Sederberg, Neelima Sehgal, Hy Trac, Licia Verde, Katerina Visnjic, and Ed Wollack. I thank the staff in the department at Princeton whose assistance has been a great help through the years, particularly Claude Champagne, Angela Glenn, Laurel Lerner, Mike Peloso, Marixa Reyes, and John Washington. 1C. S. Lewis, “Our English Syllabus” in Rehabilitations and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, 1939. vii I would be remiss not to mention our colleagues from Dynamic Structures and KUKA robotics, particularly those with whom I worked most closely: Walter Brzezik, Mike Cozza, Jeff Funke, Mel Yargeau, and Ye Zhou. Additionally, I thank the members of ALMA, ASTE, CBI/QUIET, NANTEN2, Astro-Norte, and APEX who gave much informal support in the field in Chile and are too many to list by name here. I remember with fondness my two visits to the summer schools in South Africa, for which I re- ceived funding from the NSF PIRE program. I thank our collaborators Matt Hilton, Kavilan Moodley, Ryan Warne, and all of their fellow-organizers who helped make these trips so memorable. Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika. I have been blessed with many friends in Princeton and, though sorely tempted, I cannot men- tion them all here. I will, however, give special thanks to Philip Eckhoff, Sam Feng, Nik Pavlov, Eric Switzer, and Tom Zanker, with whom I lived at various times in the past four years. Their friendship and good company have meant a great deal to me. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the United States’ National Science Foundation (via a grant to the Princeton Gravity Group), and Princeton University. The first school is the home and my most important teachers have been my family members, especially my parents. They have always given me the freedom to pursue my interests, and their love and support continues to help me become more fully alive. viii Preface When I arrived in Princeton in the autumn of 2004, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) had just been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a contract for its construction awarded to AMEC Dynamic Structures. A vigorous campaign of detector fabrication and character- ization for this new project was well underway and prototype cryogenic systems for cooling them to 300 mK were being developed. Now, as I reach the end of my doctoral program, the telescope is in the middle of its third season of observations, and we recently released our very first astrophysical results. Thus, I have had both the good fortune and the privilege of working on this project from the initial stages through to its fruition, and I have been involved in everything from instrumentation to analysis of celestial maps. Much of the work that goes into an experiment is not of interest to the wider world. The sub- stantial amount of time spent running cables, soldering, computer programming, pumping diesel, and so on, while necessary for the project and often rewarding in of itself for the laborer, cannot be represented with commensurate length in a scientific treatise. Consequently, I devote the majority of this dissertation to the data analysis I have worked on over the past year and a half. A project like the ACT is collaborative by its very nature, and I have done nothing in complete isolation from the rest of the group. Nevertheless, I have generally only included material which is substantially my own work, and have attempted to acknowledge specific contributions from colleagues whenever possible throughout the text. This dissertation is structured to lead from a general understanding of the telescope hardware to our first measurements of distant clusters of galaxies. The first chapter is an introduction to the scientific motivation for the project and also provides an overview of the telescope and its receiver. Chapter2 describes some of the control and data acquisition systems which I helped to realize. Chapter3 is about low-level data analysis and Chapter4 outlines the mapmaking algorithm I developed for the ACT data. Maps from this pipeline are used in Chapter5 to make precision measurements of the telescope beam pattern, and in Chapter6 for studying point sources and clusters of galaxies. Large portions of the final two chapters are based on our first science paper (Hincks et al., 2009). Some material in the first and second chapter may also be found in Hincks et al.(2008). ix x Contents Abstract.............................................. iii Acknowledgments ........................................ vii Preface .............................................. ix List of Figures .......................................... xiv List of Tables ........................................... xvii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Relict Radiation....................................... 1 1.1.1 Hot and Cold Spots in the CMB.......................... 2 1.1.2 Primary CMB Anisotropies ............................ 3 1.1.3 Secondary CMB Anisotropies..........................
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