Brad Benson (University of Chicago)

Date: Tue. October 9th, 2018, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Foldy room

New Results from the South Pole Telescope

I will give an overview of the South Pole Telescope (SPT), a 10-meter diameter telescope at the South Pole designed to measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB).  The SPT recently completed 10 years of observations, over which time it has been equipped with three different cameras: SPT-SZ, SPTpol, and SPT-3G. I will discuss recent results from the SPT-SZ and SPTpol surveys, including: an update on the SPT Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) cluster survey, and joint analyses with the optical dark energy survey (DES); a comparison of CMB measurements between SPT-SZ and the Planck satellite; and the latest CMB polarization power spectrum constraints from SPTpol. In addition, I will discuss the status and science goals of the recently deployed SPT-3G camera, which contains 16,000 transition edge sensor (TES) bolometers, a factor of ten increase over the previously installed SPTpol camera.  The new measurements will lead to significantly improved constraints on inflation and play a key role in sharpening current tensions among cosmological data sets, and improved constraints on extensions to the standard cosmological model.  

Host: Ruhl