Astrofisica

Cosmology above the clouds with SPIDER

by Dr Lorenzo Moncelsi (California Institute of Technology)

Europe/Rome
Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi)

Aula Conversi

Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi

Description
SPIDER is a balloon-borne microwave polarimeter designed to measure cosmological B-modes on degree angular scales in the presence of Galactic foregrounds. With six independent telescopes housing a total of ~2000 detectors in the 90 GHz and 150 GHz frequency bands, SPIDER is the most instantaneously-sensitive CMB polarimeter deployed on the sky to date. SPIDER was successfully launched from McMurdo Station, Antarctica in January 2015 and acquired science data for 16 days. I will briefly cover the in-flight performance and the expected analysis challenges. Pending recovery, the SPIDER team is already planning the next flight, featuring one or two foreground-optimized channels, which will allow us constrain the primordial tensor-mode amplitude at the level of r < 0.03 (99% CL), even in the presence of foregrounds.