Seminario DAS: "Cosmic Microwave Background Science from the South Pole Telescope and Beyond"

Speaker: Dr. Srinivasan Raghunathan
Affiliation: UC Davis

Abstract: Observations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) have played a critical role in establishing the standard cosmological paradigm, the six-parameter Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model. Besides the primary CMB anisotropies, which contain a wealth of information about the primordial universe, the secondary anisotropies of the CMB are also remarkable probes of the origin, growth, and evolution of structures in the Universe. These secondary anisotropies arise due to the interaction of CMB photons with the matter in the universe with the prominent ones being gravitational lensing and Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effects besides other fainter signals. In this talk, I will present the South Pole Telescope (SPT), a 10-metre diameter telescope located at the geographic South Pole, and the current efforts for mapping the CMB using SPT-3G, the third generation camera on SPT. Next, I will show some of the recent and upcoming results from SPT-3G which include cosmological inference from both the primary and secondary anisotropies. I will also present a detailed case for using the secondary anisotropies to shed light into some of the long-standing quests in the field of cosmological physics namely the physics of the epoch of reionization, properties of dark energy and neutrinos, and the effect of baryonic feedback on structure formation using SPT and the upcoming CMB surveys like the Simons Observatory.