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The BICEP/Keck Telescopes: CMB polarization experiment to search for primordial gravitational waves
Speaker
Jae Hwan Kang California Institute of Technology (USA)
Abstract
The inflation is the leading paradigm that describes the very early Universe. Generic inflationary models predict the existence of primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) background. The strength of PGWs can be expressed in terms of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r, which can be measured or constrained from observing the signals imprinted by PGWs on the CMB as B-mode polarization. The BICEP/Keck collaboration operates a series of telescopes at the South Pole to measure the CMB polarization at multiple frequency bands. This talk describes the configuration of the experiments and presents the latest published results which includes data taken up to 2018 observing season. The joint likelihood of the power spectra from our maps and publicly available WMAP and Planck maps versus a multicomponent model of ΛCDM+r+dust+synchrotron+noise yields the strongest constraints to date on PGWs r<0.036 at 95% confidence with σ(r)=0.009 sensitivity. The status of current observation and the ongoing upgrade is discussed.
Date and Time
March 31 2022 10am KST (= 1am UTC)