South Pole Telescope Operations and Data Products

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Among the most compelling current questions in cosmology are: What is the origin of the Universe? What is the Universe made of? What is the mass scale of neutrinos? The South Pole Telescope (SPT), currently equipped with the SPT-3G camera, plays a unique role in the pursuit of these questions. The SPT is located at the NSF's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which is the best operational site on Earth for millimeter- and submillimeter-wavelength observations. Furthermore, the unique geographical location of the site allows SPT to observe targeted low-Galactic-foreground regions of the sky at constant elevation 24 hours a day, year-round, resulting in the deepest high-resolution maps of the sky at these wavelengths. The SPT also plays a critical role in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global array of telescopes to image the event horizon around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and other, more distant galaxies. Sharing the spirit of scientific inquiry will be extended beyond the research community through a well-established education network at all levels of the education continuum, from early childhood through graduate school. The award will inaugurate an internship program in partnership with Joliet Junior College, which will fund students from underrepresented groups in paid internship positions at SPT institutions. These programs are part of the larger SPT initiative toward building a more diverse workforce, in our field and beyond. This award is to support measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with SPT-3G, the most powerful CMB camera in operation. The SPT-3G maps of the total intensity and polarization of the CMB signal already have an unprecedented combination of depth, resolution, and sky coverage, and this award would support expanding the sky coverage by over a factor of two. The measurements of the CMB temperature and polarization power spectra and the CMB lensing potential with SPT-3G play a central role in probing current cosmological tensions and determining if their explanation requires physics beyond the ΛCDM cosmological model. Recently, a key thrust of the SPT research program has been the use of high-resolution SPT-3G data to remove the gravitational lensing signal from the degree-angular-scale data taken with the BICEP Array, to enable the deepest search yet for primordial gravitational waves (PGW). Delensing with the SPT-3G dataset will extend the power of BA to detect PGW by more than a factor of 2.5, achieving constraints on the presence of PGW that will be unsurpassed for many years. This award also addresses and advances the science objectives and goals of NSF’s "Windows on the Universe: The Era of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics" program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.