12:00–1:00 pm ERC 576
Host: Patricio Gallardo
Federico Bianchini (Stanford University) "The view of large scale structure from the South Pole Telescope"
Cosmic structures are illuminated by cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons as they travel from the last scattering surface to us. CMB maps can therefore image the gravitational potentials and gas distribution through gravitational lensing and scattering processes like the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (tSZ/kSZ) effects, respectively. As such, high-resolution observations of CMB anisotropies have the potential to provide key insights into the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and neutrinos as well as the formation and evolution of cosmic structures.
In this talk I will present measurements and cosmological constraints of CMB secondary anisotropies as measured by the South Pole Telescope (SPT). I will first present a measurement of the most precise CMB lensing potential power spectrum observed by a ground-based instrument using SPTpol, a polarization-sensitive survey of 500 deg^2 operated at the SPT from 2012 to 2016, and discuss its cosmological implications. The SPTpol camera was upgraded to SPT-3G and has been surveying 1500 deg^2 of the southern sky since 2018. I will then discuss the recent pairwise kSZ analysis using SPT-3G and a sample of optically-selected galaxy clusters from the Dark Energy Survey. These measurements demonstrate the promise of studying the large scale structure with current and upcoming CMB surveys.
Federico Bianchini's short bio
Federico Bianchini is an observational cosmologist who analyzes and interprets data from cosmic microwave background and large scale structure surveys to sharpen our understanding of the origin, composition, and evolution of the Universe. After obtaining his PhD from SISSA in Italy, he moved to the University of Melbourne as a postdoctoral researcher where he joined the South Pole Telescope and POLARBEAR collaborations. At the beginning of 2021 he joined Stanford University and SLAC as a KIPAC fellow, continuing to contribute to the analysis of current ground-based surveys as well as to the design of next-generation experiments like CMB-S4.
