12:00–1:00 pm ERC 401
Host: Patricio Gallardo
Zhilei Xu (MIT) "Precision Cosmology: from CMB to 21cm"
Over the past decades, observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have established the standard cosmological model. In the future, 21cm signals from neutral hydrogen have great potential for cosmological and astrophysical studies. In this talk, I will briefly review the previous CMB observations. Then I will discuss the instrumentation and on-sky calibration of the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) and the Simons Observatory (SO). At the end, I will discuss how we can use the 21cm observation as a powerful probe to study cosmology, and introduce our novel mapping method for 21cm interferometric data.
Bio: Zhilei Xu got his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University building the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) telescopes, to search for signatures of cosmic inflation. His interests in high-resolution CMB sciences then took him to the Simons Observatory (SO) at the University of Pennsylvania building the large aperture telescope receiver (LATR). Always having 21cm cosmology in the back his mind, he then joined the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) at MIT to study cosmology with the 21cm emission.
