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The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Two-season ACTPol Extragalactic Point Sources and their Polarization properties

Authors :
Datta, Rahul
Aiola, Simone
Choi, Steve K.
Devlin, Mark
Dunkley, Joanna
Dunner, Rolando
Gallardo, Patricio A.
Gralla, Megan
Halpern, Mark
Hasselfield, Matthew
Hilton, Matt
Hincks, Adam D.
Ho, Shuay-Pwu P.
Hubmayr, Johannes
Huffenberger, Kevin M.
Hughes, John P.
Kosowsky, Arthur
Lopez-Caraballo, Carlos H.
Louis, Thibaut
Lungu, Marius
Marriage, Tobias
Maurin, Loic
McMahon, Jeff
Moodley, Kavilan
Naess, Sigurd K.
Nati, Federico
Niemack, Michael D.
Page, Lyman A.
Partridge, Bruce
Prince, Heather
Staggs, Suzanne T.
Switzer, Eric R.
Wollack, Edward J.
Publication Year :
2018

Abstract

We report on measurements of the polarization of extragalactic sources at 148 GHz made during the first two seasons of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Polarization (ACTPol) survey. The survey covered 680 deg$^{2}$ of the sky on the celestial equator. Polarization measurements of 169 intensity-selected sources brighter than 30 mJy, that are predominantly Active Galactic Nuclei, are presented. Above a total flux of 215 mJy where the noise bias removal in the polarization measurement is reliable, we detect 26 sources, 14 of which have a detection of linear polarization at greater than 3$\sigma_{p}$ significance. The distribution of the fractional polarization as a function of total source intensity is analyzed. Our result is consistent with the scenario that the fractional polarization of our measured radio source population is independent of total intensity down to the limits of our measurements and well described by a Gaussian distribution with a mean fractional polarization $p=0.028\pm$0.005 and standard deviation $\sigma_{\mathrm{p}}=0.054$, truncated at $p=0$. Extrapolating this model for the distribution of source polarization below the ACTPol detection threshold, we predict that one could get a clean measure of the E-mode polarization power spectrum of the microwave background out to $\ell=6000$ with 1 $\mu$K-arcminute maps over 10$\%$ of the sky from a future survey. We also study the spectral energy distribution of the total and polarized source flux densities by cross-matching with low radio frequency catalogs. We do not find any correlation between the spectral indices for total flux and polarized flux.

Details

Database :
arXiv
Publication Type :
Report
Accession number :
edsarx.1811.01854
Document Type :
Working Paper
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty2934