A search for cosmic microwave background anisotropies on arcminute scales with bolocam

We have surveyed two science fields totaling 1 deg² with Bolocam at 2.1 mm to search for secondary Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies caused by the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZE). The fields are in the Lynx and Subaru/XMM SDS1 fields. Our survey is sensitive to angular scales with an effective angular multipole of ℓ_eff = 5700 with FWHM _ℓ = 2800 and has an angular resolution of 60 arcsec FWHM. Our data provide no evidence for anisotropy. We are able to constrain the level of total astronomical anisotropy, modeled as a flat-band power in , with most frequent 68%, 90%, and 95% CL upper limits of 590, 760, and 830 μK ² _CMB. We statistically subtract the known contribution from primary CMB anisotropy, including cosmic variance, to obtain constraints on the SZE anisotropy contribution. Now including flux calibration uncertainty, our most frequent 68%, 90%, and 95% CL upper limits on a flat-band power in are 690, 960, and 1000 μK ² _CMB. When we instead employ the analytical spectrum suggested by Komatsu and Seljack in 2002, and account for the non-Gaussianity of the SZE anisotropy signal, we obtain upper limits on the average amplitude of their spectrum weighted by our transfer function of 790, 1060, and 1080 μK ² _CMB. We obtain a 90% CL upper limit on σ₈, which normalizes the power spectrum of density fluctuations, of 1.57. These are the first constraints on anisotropy and σ₈ from survey data at these angular scales at frequencies near 150 GHz.