THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: A MEASUREMENT OF THE PRIMORDIAL POWER SPECTRUM

Abstract

We present constraints on the primordial power spectrum of adiabatic fluctuations using data from the 2008 Southern Survey of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in combination with measurements from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and a prior on the Hubble constant. The angular resolution of ACT provides sensitivity to scales beyond l = 1000 for resolution of multiple peaks in the primordial temperature power spectrum, which enables us to probe the primordial power spectrum of adiabatic scalar perturbations with wavenumbers up to k similar or equal to 0.2 Mpc(-1). We find no evidence for deviation from power-law fluctuations over two decades in scale. Matter fluctuations inferred from the primordial temperature power spectrum evolve over cosmic time and can be used to predict the matter power spectrum at late times; we illustrate the overlap of the matter power inferred from cosmic microwave background measurements (which probe the power spectrum in the linear regime) with existing probes of galaxy clustering, cluster abundances, and weak-lensing constraints on the primordial power. This highlights the range of scales probed by current measurements of the matter power spectrum.