Emerging Technologies for Studying the Cosmic Microwave Background

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Jeff McMahon, University of Michigan

The Cosmic Microwave background (CMB) permits the measurement of a number of unique and as yet undetected cosmological signals including imprints of the energy scale of inflation and of the sum of the neutrino masses. Measuring these signals requires constant innovation in instrumentation. In this talk, McMahon presents the science possible with future measurements of the CMB and describes some of the technologies that have recently been developed for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Polarization experiment (ACTPol). These technologies include broad-band multi-chroic detectors, meta-material anti-reflection coated lenses, and the first use of a dilution refrigerator on a ground-based CMB experiment.

Jeff McMahon is an experimentalist who studies cosmology and fundamental physics through measurements of the cosmic microwave background. Professor McMahon and his research group collaborate with the ACTPol, the South Pole Telescope (SPT), and the MUSTANG2 teams to study various topics related to the CMB.