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Aseyhe t1_j2kty6j wrote

I just lazily took pi/l for l=2500, the largest l that Planck papers plot. Indeed, the ground-based telescopes push to somewhat higher l.

Hmm, around 1 degree (where the fluctuation power peaks), the time scale for the CMB to change would be of order a billion years, or one part in ~10^(9) per year. I wonder how far off that kind of sensitivity is.

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amaurea t1_j2kuo6l wrote

Yes, they typically plot out to l=10000, but all the power out there comes from point sources (if one doesn't clean those away). I used 360°/l, but if I use 180°/l the ACT foreground cleaned spectrum becomes too faint to be detectable at 2.9 arcmin.

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amaurea t1_j2m8d9y wrote

(Actually, come to think of it, shouldn't the formula be sqrt(4pi)/(lmax+1)? Alms from 0 to lmax have (lmax+1)² degrees of freedom (sum_0^lmax (2l+1)). This is enough information to split the full sky into (lmax+1)² pixels, which would then have a side length of sqrt(4pi)/(lmax+1). This works out to 1.13*pi/l, so very close to your formula and far from the 2pi/l I had been using.)

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