2:00–4:00 pm
Please Join us:
Wei Quan's PhD Thesis Defense
Friday, March 8, 2024, at 2:00 p.m. CST
ANALYSIS OF COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND TEMPERATURE AND E-MODE POLARIZATION ANISOTROPY WITH 2019 AND 2020 DATA FROM THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE
The angular power spectra of the three types of two-point correlations obtained from the temperature and E-mode polarization anisotropy of the CMB (TT/TE/EE spectra) encode information on the composition and evolution of the universe. Measurements of the spectra contributed to establishing the LCDM cosmological model as the standard, and the Planck satellite experiment achieved subpercent-precision constraints on parameters of LCDM by mainly using its TT/TE spectra at large angular scales. However, there are also challenges to LCDM, a major one being the Hubble tension. Better measurements of the TE/EE spectra at small angular scales by other experiments like the South Pole Telescope (SPT) serve as a consistency test of Planck’s results and may provide new insights on the tension. Since 2019, we have been taking data consistently with SPT-3G, the third-generation imaging instrument installed on the telescope in 2017. In this presentation, I will discuss my data analysis projects on SPT-3G. After introducing the TT/TE/EE spectra and SPT-3G, I will highlight a few low-level analysis tasks I worked on early on. Following that, I will describe the science analysis project I have been co-leading, which is using data from 2019 and 2020 to substantially improve SPT-3G's existing measurements of the TE/EE spectra and constraints on cosmological parameters based on data from 2018 and to prepare for a future analysis based on the full dataset from SPT-3G. We have produced maps of the CMB anisotropy and their spectra and are working on constraining cosmological parameters. The uncertainties in the TE/EE spectra at small angular scales from this new dataset are smaller than those from the 2018 dataset by an order of magnitude. I will show our maps and spectra and discuss the remaining tasks.
Committee Members:
John Carlstrom (Co-Chair)
Tom Crawford (Co-Chair)
Emil Martinec
Mel Shochet
Wei is excited to be a postdoc at Argonne National Laboratory from May.