- April 29, 2024, 2:00 pm US/Central
- Curia II
- Srinivasan Raghunathan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Joshua Sobrin (Host), jsobrin@fnal.gov
- Speaker Webpage
Secondary anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are known to be remarkable probes of astrophysics and cosmology. The properties of free streaming CMB photons from the surface of last scattering are altered by their interaction with matter in the Universe carrying crucial information about the the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR) and also the origin, growth, and evolution of structures. In this talk, I will discuss the potential of a couple of these secondary anisotropies, namely the kinematic and thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ and tSZ) effects, to shed light into some of the long-standing cosmological quests like the physics of reionisation and the nature of dark energy & neutrinos. I will also demonstrate the challenges posed by astrophysical foregrounds for the detection of these small-scale anisotropies and discuss strategies for mitigating them. Finally, I will present a recent result from the South Pole Telescope which set the first constraint on the EoR using the non-Gaussian nature of the kSZ signal and then present the prospects of SZ science with future surveys like the CMB-S4 experiment.