High Energy-Astrophysics | The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: the Present and the Future

Speaker: Sudeep Das (Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, UC Berkeley)

Arcminute resolution observations of the mm-wave sky are changing our view of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in a fundamental way. Together with mapping out the acoustic features on the Silk damping tail of CMB, data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) are providing new insights into secondary CMB anisotropies and extragalactic point source populations that dominate the scene at small angular scales. A set of recent and upcoming papers showcases the broad spectrum of science coming out of the ACT project: ranging from power spectra, to new constraints on cosmological parameters, to a successful survey of galaxy clusters using the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. In the first part of the talk, I will review these recent developments and give a status report on ACT. Then, I will describe future projects involving the gravitational lensing of the CMB, and the cross-correlation with external data sets. Finally, I will touch upon the prospects for ACTPOL, the version of ACT with  polarization capabilities, which is scheduled to see first light in 2012.