Kathryn Schaffer
University of Chicago, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
Science with the South Pole Telescope
The South Pole Telescope is a 10-meter telescope designed to survey
the millimeter-wave sky, taking advantage of the exceptional observing
conditions at the NSF South Pole Station. The first phase of the
project involves a survey of many hundreds of square degrees of the
southern sky, with measurements at 90GHz, 150GHz, and 220GHz. The
data from this first phase can be used to detect large numbers of
galaxy clusters for Dark Energy studies, test the properties of
individual clusters, explore millimeter-wave sources, and probe the
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) power spectrum at small angular
scales. In the second phase of the project, we will install
polarization-sensitive detectors and make measurements of the power
spectrum of the polarization of the CMB. I will give an overview of
these science goals, describe the most important features of the
design of the instrument, and give some recent results.
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