For seminars and other local announcements, please subscribe to sfu-cosmo mailing list.
Friday, 27 March 2009, 14:30 in AQ3182
Prof. Suzanne Staggs (Princeton University)
The impact of the last 13 billion years and of the first 10-35 seconds on the CMB (physics colloquium)
Beyond its revelations to date on the structure, dynamics and contents of the universe, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation has more physical data to be mined. We describe two experimental approaches designed to complement the reach of the WMAP and Planck satellites. The first is the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) project. ACT is mapping the CMB sky in three frequency bands (145, 215 and 265 GHz) with a resolution 5-10 times better than that of those satellites. The fine-scale anisotropy of the CMB reflects the primordial power spectrum of density fluctuations, but also encodes details of its interactions with the rest of the universe in its 13-billion-year flight. Moreover, these details depend on fundamental quantiites of the universe including the mass of the neutrino, the equation of state of the dark energy, and the nature of the dark matter. The second experimental approach we describe is measurement of the large-scale polarization anisotropy of the CMB; we will mention both the QUI ExperimenT (QUIET) and the Atacama B-mode Search (ABS). Gravitational waves generated during any inflationary epoch (in the first 10 atto-attoseconds) can give rise to a specific pattern in the tensor field of the CMB polarization observed on the celestial sphere, dubbed B-modes, which has no other primordial source.
Seminars in 2008:
[ See complete seminar archives | iCal feed ]
Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01