Abstract: The South Pole Telescope (SPT), a 10-meter millimeter-wavelength telescope located at the geographic South Pole, has been used to conduct several wide-area surveys including the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ survey, and the 500-square- degree SPTpol Survey (which reached depths of 5.3 uK-arcmin at 150 GHz, ~3x deeper than SPT-SZ), and the new 2500-square-degree SPTpol Extended Cluster Survey to the north of the SPT-SZ footprint. One of the primary objectives of these wide-area SPT surveys was the construction of mass-limited samples of galaxy clusters identified via the thermal Sunyaev- Zel”dovich (SZ) effect. The abundance of such clusters is a powerful cosmological probe as it depends sensitively upon both the expansion history of the universe and the growth of density fluctuations. In this talk I will discuss progress analyzing these three datasets including updated cosmological constraints from the initial SPT- SZ cluster sample using new weak lensing data as well as ongoing work from a new project characterizing the strong lensing properties of these systems. The results presented in this talk will be significantly improved with data from the new SPT-3G survey—deployed in January 2017—that will identify an order of magnitude more clusters than previous generation SZ surveys.
Cosmological Constraints from Clusters Discovered by the South Pole Telescope
Lindsey Bleem (Argonne National Lab) // May 31, 2018
Abstract: The South Pole Telescope (SPT), a 10-meter millimeter-wavelength telescope located at the geographic South Pole, has been used to conduct several wide-area surveys including the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ survey, and the 500-square- degree SPTpol Survey (which reached depths of 5.3 uK-arcmin at 150 GHz, ~3x deeper than SPT-SZ), and the new 2500-square-degree SPTpol Extended Cluster Survey to the north of the SPT-SZ footprint. One of the primary objectives of these wide-area SPT surveys was the construction of mass-limited samples of galaxy clusters identified via the thermal Sunyaev- Zel”dovich (SZ) effect. The abundance of such clusters is a powerful cosmological probe as it depends sensitively upon both the expansion history of the universe and the growth of density fluctuations. In this talk I will discuss progress analyzing these three datasets including updated cosmological constraints from the initial SPT- SZ cluster sample using new weak lensing data as well as ongoing work from a new project characterizing the strong lensing properties of these systems. The results presented in this talk will be significantly improved with data from the new SPT-3G survey—deployed in January 2017—that will identify an order of magnitude more clusters than previous generation SZ surveys.