Abstract

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 _CDMsix-parameter cosmologicalmodel 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 kp = 0.013 Mpc-1 to be {h2Ωc, h2Ωb, H0, As, ns,Г}={0.113, 0.0224, 70.6, 2.29×10-9, 0.960, 0.086}.