CMB/kSZ and Compton-$y$ Maps from 2500 square degrees of SPT-SZ and Planck Survey Data

Understand

We present component-separated maps of the primary cosmic microwave background/kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) amplitude and the thermal SZ Compton-$y$ parameter, created using data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and the Planck satellite.

• These maps, which cover the $\sim$2500 square degrees of the Southern sky imaged by the SPT-SZ survey, represent a significant improvement over previous such products available in this region by virtue of their higher angular resolution (1.25 arcminutes for our highest resolution Compton-$y$ maps) and lower noise at small angular scales.
• In this work we detail the construction of these maps using linear combination techniques, including our method for limiting the correlation of our lowest-noise Compton-$y$ map products with the cosmic infrared background.
• We perform a range of validation tests on these data products to test our sky modeling and combination algorithms, and we find good performance in all of these tests.