Paul Richards
University of California, Berkeley
Friday, October 19, 2007
4:00 pm in SPL 57
Measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Abstract: Measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provide our earliest direct information about the evolving Universe. This talk will summarize how the CMB was produced and why it is important. The focus will than shift to the experimental challenge of extracting Cosmological information from the CMB. Examples will be given of technology developments in small-scale experiments leading to the major space missions, which produce definitive data sets. These experimental challenges have stimulated enormous development of bolometric detectors, which have been used to measure both the spectrum and the anisotropy of the CMB. The CMB is now being used as a tool to locate and understand clusters of galaxies in order to better understand the formation of structure in the universe. Experiments are now beginning to measure the anisotropy of the polarization of the CMB in hopes of observing evidence for gravity waves radiated during the time of inflation. The large format arrays of bolometric detectors being developed for these new CMB measurements will be described.
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