Parameter Estimation from Improved Measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background from QUaD

We evaluate the contribution of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization spectra to cosmological parameter constraints. We produce cosmological parameters using high-quality CMB polarization data from the ground-based QUaD experiment and demonstrate for the majority of parameters that there is significant improvement on the constraints obtained from satellite CMB polarization data. We split a multi-experiment CMB data set into temperature and polarization subsets and show that the best-fit confidence regions for the ΛCDM six-parameter cosmological model are consistent with each other, and that polarization data reduces the confidence regions on all parameters. We provide the best limits on parameters from QUaD EE/BB polarization data and we find best-fit parameters from the multi-experiment CMB data set using the optimal pivot scale of k_p = 0.013 Mpc^(–1) to be {h^2Ω_c, h^2Ω_b, H_0, A_s, n_s, τ} = {0.113, 0.0224, 70.6, 2.29 × 10^(–9), 0.960, 0.086}.