July 24, 2014 | 12:00 PM | LASR Conference Room | Open Group seminar Cosmology with small-scale CMB polarization with ACTPol and AdvACT Renee Hlozek, Princeton University
Measurements of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Backround (CMB) complement existing measurements of temperature anisotropies. I will present results from ACTPol, the polarization sensitive receiver for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), which measures CMB polarization from arcminute to degree scales. In addition I will discuss the recently-funded Stage III Advanced ACTPol project, AdvACT, which will offer improved sensitivity and frequency coverage than ACTPol. In this talk I will discuss ACTPol constraints and projections achievable with the Advanced ACTPol experiment. In addition to constraining the standard cosmological model parameters, I will focus on projected constraints on dark energy and modified gravity from cross-correlations of CMB polarization with optical surveys. Finally I will highlight recent work on the power of combining AdvACT polarization with temperature data to constrain the physics of reionization through the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect.