PHYS/ASTR Colloquium: "Mapping the Millimeter Universe from the Atacama Desert" - Dr. Carlos Sierra (Postdoc, KIPAC/Stanford U.)
Overview
San Francisco State University
Physics & Astronomy Colloquium Series
Monday, March 17, 2025
SEC 210, 3:30 PM
Dr. Carlos Sierra (Post-doc, KIPAC/Stanford U.)
"Mapping the Millimeter Universe from the Atacama Desert"
In recent years, large scale sky surveys at millimeter wavelengths have produced high-fidelity maps of the various signals in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These include primordial temperature and polarization, as well as late-universe effects such as gravitational lensing and baryon scattering. Together, these maps offer a glimpse into nearly every epoch of cosmic history, allowing us to constrain large gaps in our standard model of cosmology and offering insights into recent alarming discrepancies in measurements of cosmic expansion and the distribution of matter.
In this talk, I will review the ways that we measure the CMB anisotropies and introduce the Simons Observatory, a new observing facility in the Chilean Atacama Desert designed to target these signals using an array of telescopes equipped with extremely sensitive cameras. I will conclude with a brief overview of an advanced laboratory testing program that we have developed to validate the optical performance of these cameras prior to deployment.
