Speaker
Bradford Benson
(Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
Description
I will give an overview of the science results and cosmological constraints from the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The SPT is a 10-meter diameter telescope designed for observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). I will highlight recent results from the completed SPT-SZ survey and the underway SPTpol survey, and discuss the projected constraints for the future SPT-3G survey. The SPT data has been used to make new measurements of the CMB temperature and polarization power spectra, characterize the gravitational lensing of the CMB by large-scale structure, and to constrain the evolution of the abundance of galaxy clusters. These measurements have been used to put new constraints on dark energy and modified gravity, the sum of the neutrino masses, and the effective number of neutrino species. Future SPT-3G measurements will be used to to test and constrain physics at Planck energy scales (1e16 GeV), to constrain the sum of the neutrino masses with a sensitivity near the minimum mass expected from neutrino oscillations (<0.06 eV), and to constrain the relativistic energy density of the Universe with a sensitivity 4 times better than current constraints.
Primary author
Bradford Benson
(Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
