The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-m mm-wave telescope located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The SPT is optimized for making ultra-sensitive measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy and other diffuse low-surface brightness phenomena from degree to arcminute angular scales over thousands of square degrees of the sky. The first SPT experiment was SPT-SZE, which operated from 2007-2012 using a 960 detector focal plane made by UC-Berkeley. High impact results from SPT-SZE include the first detection of galaxy clusters using the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and precision measurements of the CMB damping tail. In 2012, SPT upgraded to a polarimeter, SPTpol, which uses a 1600 detector focal plane with detector fabricated by NIST and ANL. Results from SPTpol include the first detection of CMB B-mode polarization (from CMB lensing) and recently, the best measurement of the CMB E-mode power spectrum at small angular scales and a measurement of CMB lensing using information from both intensity and polarization. In this talk, I will present an update on the status of the SPT program and discuss some of the recent results. I will discuss the planned future activities for CMB at Argonne which include, SPT-3G, an upgrade to SPT in 2016 involving 16,000 detectors fabricated by ANL and the CMB-S4 experiment.

Argonne Physics Division Colloquium Schedule