About Me:
I'm a Senior Research Associate in the
Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics
at the
University of Chicago
and an Associate Fellow at the
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.
For the past six years, I have worked on a single project: The
10-meter South Pole Telescope (SPT).
The SPT is a millimeter-wave telescope designed to make sensitive
measurements of diffuse, low-contrast emission, such as anisotropy
in the
cosmic microwave background (CMB).
Equipped with a highly sensitive ~1000-element
bolometer array operating at 95, 150, and 220 GHz,
the SPT is capable of mapping the arcminute-scale anisotropy of the
CMB to exquisite precision. The first goal of the SPT is to use
the CMB as a backlight to discover distant, massive clusters of
galaxies through their interaction with the CMB, known as the
Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect.
We have recently
reported
the first successful use of SZ observations to find previously unknown clusters.
During the six years I have worked on this project, I have
particpated in the design of the telescope, optics, and receiver;
I have designed and built a protoype SPT receiver (which was used
to qualify the secondary mirror and cold optics box); and now I am
one of the leaders of the data analysis effort.
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