The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r) = 0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensorto-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources a .

We describe the observations and resultant galaxy cluster catalog from the 2770 deg 2 SPTpolExtended Cluster Survey (SPT-ECS). Clusters are identified via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect and confirmed with a combination of archival and targeted follow-up data, making particular use of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). With incomplete follow-up we have confirmed as clusters 244 of 266 candidates at a detection significance ξ5 and an additional 204systems at 4<ξ<5. The confirmed sample has a median mass of~´-M Mh 4.4 10 c 500 14 70 1  and a median redshift of z=0.49, and we have identified 44strong gravitational lenses in the sample thus far. Radio data are used to characterize contamination to the SZ signal; the median contamination for confirmed clusters is predicted to be ∼1% of the SZ signal at the ξ>4 threshold, and <4% of clusters have a predicted contamination >10% of their measured SZ flux. We associate SZ-selected clusters, from both SPT-ECS and the SPT-SZ survey, with clusters from the DES redMaPPer sample, and we find an offset distribution between the SZ center and central galaxy in general agreement with previous work, though with a larger fraction of clusters with significant offsets. Adopting a fixed Planck-like cosmology, we measure the optical richness-SZ mass (l-M) relation and find it to be 28% shallower than that from a weak-lensing analysis of the DES data-a difference significant at the 4σ level-with the relations intersecting at λ=60. The SPT-ECS cluster sample will be particularly useful for studying the evolution of massive clusters and, in combination with DES lensing observations and the SPT-SZ cluster sample, will be an important component of future cosmological analyses.

We present a measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing potential using 500 deg 2 of 150 GHz data from the SPTpol receiver on the South Pole Telescope. The lensing potential is reconstructed with signal-to-noise per mode greater than unity at lensing multipoles L 250, using a quadratic estimator on a combination of CMB temperature and polarization maps. We report measurements of the lensing potential power spectrum in the multipole range of 100 < L < 2000 from sets of temperature-only (T), polarization-only (POL), and minimum-variance (MV) estimators. We measure the lensing amplitude by taking the ratio of the measured spectrum to the expected spectrum from the best-fit ΛCDM model to the Planck 2015 TT+lowP+lensing dataset. For the minimumvariance estimator, we find A MV = 0.944 ± 0.058 (Stat.) ± 0.025 (Sys.); restricting to only polarization data, we find A POL = 0.906 ± 0.090 (Stat.) ± 0.040 (Sys.). Considering statistical uncertainties alone, this is the most precise polarization-only lensing amplitude constraint to date (10.1 σ), and is more precise than our temperature-only constraint. We perform null tests and consistency checks and find no evidence for significant contamination. †

CMB-S4—the next-generation ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment—is set to significantly advance the sensitivity of CMB measurements and enhance our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe. Among the science cases pursued with CMB-S4, the quest for detecting primordial gravitational waves is a central driver of the experimental design. This work details the development of a forecasting framework that includes a power-spectrum-based semianalytic projection tool, targeted explicitly toward optimizing constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, in the presence of Galactic foregrounds and gravitational lensing of the CMB. This framework is unique in its direct use of information from the achieved performance of current Stage 2–3 CMB experiments to robustly forecast the science reach of upcoming CMB-polarization endeavors. The methodology allows for rapid iteration over experimental configurations and offers a flexible way to optimize the design of future experiments, given a desired scientific goal. To form a closed-loop process, we couple this semianalytic tool with map-based validation studies, which allow for the injection of additional complexity and verification of our forecasts with several independent analysis methods. We document multiple rounds of forecasts for CMB-S4 using this process and the resulting establishment of the current reference design of the primordial gravitational-wave component of the Stage-4 experiment, optimized to achieve our science goals of detecting primordial gravitational waves for r > 0.003 at greater than 5σ, or in the absence of a detection, of reaching an upper limit of r < 0.001 at 95% CL.

We present measurements of the E-mode (EE) polarization power spectrum and temperature-E-mode (TE) cross-power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background using data collected by SPT-3G, the latest instrument installed on the South Pole Telescope. This analysis uses observations of a 1500 deg 2 region at 95, 150, and 220 GHz taken over a four-month period in 2018. We report binned values of the EE and TE power spectra over the angular multipole range 300 ≤ l < 3000, using the multifrequency data to construct six semi-independent estimates of each power spectrum and their minimum-variance combination. These measurements improve upon the previous results of SPTpol across the multipole ranges 300 ≤ l ≤ 1400 for EE and 300 ≤ l ≤ 1700 for TE, resulting in constraints on cosmological parameters comparable to those from other current leading ground-based experiments. We find that the SPT-3G data set is well fit by a ΛCDM cosmological model with parameter constraints consistent with those from Planck and SPTpol data. From SPT-3G data alone, we find H 0 ¼ 68.8 AE 1.5 km s −1 Mpc −1 and σ 8 ¼ 0.789 AE 0.016, with a gravitational lensing amplitude consistent with the ΛCDM prediction (A L ¼ 0.98 AE 0.12). We combine the SPT-3G and the Planck data sets and obtain joint constraints on the ΛCDM model. The volume of the 68% confidence region in six-dimensional ΛCDM parameter space is reduced by a factor of 1.5 compared to Planck-only constraints, with no significant shifts in central values. We note that the results presented here are obtained from data collected during just half of a typical observing season with only part of the focal plane operable, and that the active detector count has since nearly doubled for observations made with SPT-3G after 2018.