Observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies with BOOMERANG 2003

The BOOMERANG experiment completed its final long duration balloon (LDB) flight over Antarctica in January 2003. The focal plane was upgraded to accommodate four sets of 145 GHz polarization sensitive bolometers (PSBs), identical to those to be flown on the Planck HFI instrument. Approximately, 195 hours of science observations were obtained during this flight, including 75 hours distributed over 1.84% of the sky and an additional 120 hours concentrated on a region covering 0.22% of the sky. We derive the angular power spectra of the cosmic microwave background (emu) temperature and polarization anisotropies from these data. The temperature anisotropies are detected with high signal to noise on angular scales ranging from several degrees to similar to 10 arcminutes. The curl-free (EE) component is detected at similar to 4.8 sigma, and a two-sigma upper limit on the curl (BB) component of 8.6 mu K-2 is obtained on scales corresponding to similar to 0.5 degrees. Both the temperature and polarization anisotropies are found to be consistent with a concordance Lambda CDM cosmology that is seeded by adiabatic density perturbations. In addition to the CMB observations, BOOMERANG03 surveyed a similar to 300 square degree region centered on the Galactic plane. These observations represent the first light for polarization sensitive bolometers, which are currently operational in two South-Pole based polarimeters, as well as Planck HFI, at frequencies ranging from 100 to 350 GHz (3 mm to 850 pm). (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.