- Oct. 21, 2024, 2:00 pm US/Central
- Curia II
- Katie Harrington, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)
- Joshua Sobrin (Host), jsobrin@fnal.gov
The Simons Observatory (SO) is a next generation Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiment that is currently undergoing commissioning in the Chilean Atacama Desert. SO’s scientific objectives encompass the characterization of the primordial perturbations, the measurement of the number of relativistic species and the sum of the mass of neutrinos, improving our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constraining the duration of reionization. SO will accomplish these goals using a single 6-m large-aperture telescope (LAT) to focus on the smaller angular scales and three 0.5-m small-aperture telescopes (SATs) to focus on the larger angular scales. In their initial configurations, these telescopes will contain nearly 60,000 microwave multiplexed transition edge sensor bolometers spread across six frequency bands from 30-280 GHz. I will review the scientific objectives of Simons Observatory as well as the survey and instrument designs. I will then discuss the pre-deployment optical testing and characterization program as well as early commissioning results.