We (a large collaboration!) are designing a new ground-based experiment, funded primarily by DOE and NSF, that will have instruments in Chile and at the South Pole, designed to harvest a wealth of information from the Cosmic Microwave Background. The main science goals are to:
- Search for (hopefully discover!) the signature of primordial gravitational waves generated when the universe was 10-34 seconds old, during Cosmic Inflation.
- Search for the effects of new particles ("light relics") via their impact on the expansion rate of the very young universe, and the impact that has on the statistics (angular power spectra) of the CMB.
- Use the clusters of galaxies as a probe of the formation of large scale structure in the universe, to better understand that process as well as Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
- Spring open the new window of millimeter-wave time-domain astronomy, with unprecedented large daily maps of the millimeter-wave sky.
I serve as Instrument Scientist for the project, and our group here is working on instrument modeling (sensitivity, systematics and understanding requirements), as well as developing hardware for testing and calibrating the instrument.
See the collaboration website for more details.