Cosmology with the South Pole Telescope

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter millimeter-wavelength telescope located at the geographic South Pole, one of the world’s premier sites for millimeter-wavelength observations. The telescope is optimized for observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic afterglow of the Big Bang explosion at the beginning of the universe. The CMB contains a wealth of information on both fundamental physics and cosmology and observations by the SPT have led to a number of breakthrough scientific results including: precise measurements of both the damping tail and secondary anisotropies of the CMB, measurements of the gravitational lensing of the CMB (including the first detection of the B-mode polarization of the CMB generated by gravitational lensing), constraints on the epoch of reionization, and the discovery of hundreds of massive galaxy clusters via the thermal Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (SZ) effect.

In this talk I will highlight recent and upcoming cosmological results from the SPT, particularly focusing on results derived using the new galaxy cluster sample identified in the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ Survey. The abundance of such galaxy clusters is a powerful cosmological probe as it depends upon both the expansion history of the universe and the growth of density fluctuations. With improved mass calibration, the SPT cluster sample will constrain models of Dark Energy with a precision comparable to the best current constraints from geometric measurements of the universe, and, by measuring the effect of Dark Energy on the growth of structure, serve as an independent test of the standard dark energy paradigm.