The next generation "Stage-4" ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment, CMB-S4, consisting of dedicated telescopes equipped with highly sensitive superconducting cameras operating at the South Pole, the high Chilean Atacama plateau, and possibly northern hemisphere sites, will provide a dramatic leap forward in our understanding of the fundamental nature of space and time and the evolution of the Universe. CMB-S4 will be designed to cross critical thresholds in testing inflation, determining the number and masses of the neutrinos, constraining possible new light relic particles, providing precise constraints on the nature of dark energy, and testing general relativity on large scales.CMB-S4 is intended to be the definitive ground-based CMB project. It will deliver a highly constraining data set with which any model for the origin of the primordial fluctuations-be it inflation or an alternative theory-and their evolution to the structure seen in the Universe today must be consistent. While we have learned a great deal from CMB measurements, including discoveries that have pointed the way to new physics, we have only begun to tap the information encoded in CMB polarization, CMB lensing and other secondary effects. The discovery space from these and other yet to be imagined effects will be maximized by designing CMB-S4 to produce high-fidelity maps, which will also ensure enormous legacy value for CMB-S4. CMB-S4 is the logical successor to the Stage-3 CMB projects which will operate over the next few years. For maximum impact, CMB-S4 should be implemented on a schedule that allows a transition from Stage 3 to Stage 4 that is as seamless and as timely as possible, preserving the expertise in the community and ensuring a continued stream of CMB science results. This timing is also necessary to ensure the optimum synergistic enhancement of the science return from contemporaneous optical surveys (e.g., LSST, DESI, Euclid and WFIRST). Information learned from the ongoing Stage-3 experiments can be easily incorporated into CMB-S4 with little or no impact on its design. In particular, additional information on the properties of Galactic foregrounds would inform the detailed distribution of detectors among frequency bands in CMB-S4. The sensitivity and fidelity of the multiple band foreground measurements needed to realize the goals of CMB-S4 will be provided by CMB-S4 itself, at frequencies just below and above those of the main CMB channels. This timeline is possible because CMB-S4 will use proven existing technology that has been developed and demonstrated by the CMB experimental groups over the last decade. There are, to be sure, considerable technical challenges presented by the required scaling-up of the instrumentation and by the scope and complexity of the data analysis and interpretation. CMB-S4 will require: scaled-up superconducting detector arrays with well-understood and robust material properties and processing techniques; high-throughput mmwave telescopes and optics with unprecedented precisi...

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Advanced ACTPol is a polarization-sensitive upgrade for the 6 m aperture Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), adding new frequencies and increasing sensitivity over the previous ACTPol receiver. In 2016, Advanced ACTPol will begin to map approximately half the sky in five frequency bands (28-230 GHz). Its maps of primary and secondary cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies -- imaged in intensity and polarization at few arcminute-scale resolution -- will enable precision cosmological constraints and also a wide array of cross-correlation science that probes the expansion history of the universe and the growth of structure via gravitational collapse. To accomplish these scientific goals, the Advanced ACTPol receiver will be a significant upgrade to the ACTPol receiver, including four new multichroic arrays of cryogenic, feedhorn-coupled AlMn transition edge sensor (TES) polarimeters (fabricated on 150 mm diameter wafers); a system of continuously rotating meta-material silicon half-wave plates; and a new multiplexing readout architecture which uses superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) and time division to achieve a 64-row multiplexing factor. Here we present the status and scientific goals of the Advanced ACTPol instrument, emphasizing the design and implementation of the Advanced ACTPol cryogenic detector arrays.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, conference proceedings submitted to Journal of Low Temperature Physic

We summarize the utility of precise cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization measurements as probes of the physics of inflation. We focus on the prospects for using CMB measurements to differentiate various inflationary mechanisms. In particular, a de tection of primordial B-mode polarization would demonstrate that inflation occurred at a very high energy scale, and that the inflaton traversed a super-Planckian distance in field space. We explain how such a detection or constraint would illuminate aspects of physics at the Planck scale. Moreover, CMB measurements can constrain the scale-dependence and non-Gaussianity of the primordial fluctuations and limit the possibility of a significant isocurvature contribution. Each such limit provides crucial information on the underlying inflationary dynamics. Finally, we quantify these considerations by presenting forecasts for the sensitivities of a future satellite experiment to the inflationary parameters. 10Reuse of AIP Publishing content is subject to the terms at: https://publishing.aip. Striking advances in observational cosmology over the past two decades have provided us with a consistent account of the form and composition of the universe. Now that key cosmological parameters have been determined to within a few percent, we anticipate a generation of experiments that move beyond adding precision to measurements of what the universe is made of, but instead help us learn why the universe has the form we observe. In particular, during the coming decade, observational cosmology will probe the detailed dynamics of the universe in the earliest instants after the Big Bang, and start to yield clues about the physical laws that governed that epoch. Future experiments will plausibly reveal the dynamics responsible both for the large-scale homogeneity and flatness of the universe, and for the primordial seeds of small-scale inhomogeneities, including our own galaxy.The leading theoretical paradigm for the initial moments of the Big Bang is inflation [1][2][3][4][5][6], a period of rapid accelerated expansion. Inflation sets the initial conditions for conventional Big Bang cosmology by driving the universe towards a homogeneous and spatially flat configuration, which accurately describes the average state of the universe. At the same time, quantum fluctuations in both matter fields and spacetime produce minute inhomogeneities [7][8][9][10][11][12]. The seeds that grow into the galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are thus planted during the first moments of the universe's existence. By measuring the anisotropies in the microwave background and the large scale distribution of galaxies in the sky, we can infer the spectrum of the primordial perturbations laid down during inflation, and thus probe the underlying physics of this era. Any successful inflationary model will deliver a universe that is, on average, spatially flat and homogeneous -and one homogeneous universe looks very much like ano...

Strong gravitational lenses are now being routinely discovered in wide-field surveys at (sub-)millimeter wavelengths. We present Submillimeter Array (SMA) high-spatial resolution imaging and Gemini-South and Multiple Mirror Telescope optical spectroscopy of strong lens candidates discovered in the two widest extragalactic surveys conducted by the Herschel Space Observatory: the Herschel-Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS) and the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES). From a sample of 30 Herschel sources with S 500 > 100 mJy, 21 are strongly lensed (i.e., multiply imaged), 4 are moderately lensed (i.e., singly imaged), and the remainder require additional data to determine their lensing status. We apply a visibility-plane lens modeling technique to the SMA data to recover information about the masses of the lenses as well as the intrinsic (i.e., unlensed) sizes (r half ) and far-infrared luminosities (L FIR ) of the lensed submillimeter galaxies (SMGs). The sample of lenses comprises primarily isolated massive galaxies, but includes some groups and clusters as well. Several of the lenses are located at z lens > 0.7, a redshift regime that is inaccessible to lens searches based on Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopy. The lensed SMGs are amplified by factors that are significantly below statistical model predictions given the 500 µm flux densities of our sample. We speculate that this may reflect a deficiency in our understanding of the intrinsic sizes and luminosities of the brightest SMGs. The lensed SMGs span nearly one decade in L FIR (median L FIR = 7.9 × 10 12 L ) and two decades in FIR luminosity surface density (median Σ FIR = 6.0 × 10 11 L kpc −2 ). The strong lenses in this sample and others identified via (sub-)mm surveys will provide a wealth of information regarding the astrophysics of galaxy formation and evolution over a wide range in redshift.

Unresolved anisotropies of the cosmic near-infrared background radiation are expected to have contributions from the earliest galaxies during the epoch of reionization and from faint, dwarf galaxies at intermediate redshifts. Previous measurements were unable to pinpoint conclusively the dominant origin because they did not sample spatial scales that were sufficiently large to distinguish between these two possibilities. Here we report a measurement of the anisotropy power spectrum from subarcminute to one-degree angular scales, and find the clustering amplitude to be larger than predicted by the models based on the two existing explanations. As the shot-noise level of the power spectrum is consistent with that expected from faint galaxies, a new source population on the sky is not necessary to explain the observations. However, a physical mechanism that increases the clustering amplitude is needed. Motivated by recent results related to the extended stellar light profile in dark-matter haloes, we consider the possibility that the fluctuations originate from intrahalo stars of all galaxies. We find that the measured power spectrum can be explained by an intrahalo light fraction of 0.07 to 0.2 per cent relative to the total luminosity in dark-matter haloes of 10(9) to 10(12) solar masses at redshifts of about 1 to 4.

We present a list of 13 candidate gravitationally lensed submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) from 95 deg 2 of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey, a surface density of 0.14 ± 0.04 deg −2. The selected sources have 500 μm flux densities (S 500) greater than 100 mJy. Gravitational lensing is confirmed by follow-up observations in 9 of the 13 systems (70%), and the lensing status of the four remaining sources is undetermined. We also present a supplementary sample of 29 (0.31 ± 0.06 deg −2) gravitationally lensed SMG candidates with S 500 = 80-100 mJy, which are expected to contain a higher fraction of interlopers than the primary candidates. The number counts of the candidate lensed galaxies are consistent with a simple statistical model of the lensing rate, which uses a foreground matter distribution, the intrinsic SMG number counts, and an assumed SMG redshift distribution. The model predicts that 32%-74% of our S 500 100 mJy candidates are strongly gravitationally lensed (μ 2), with the brightest sources being the most robust; this is consistent with the observational data. Our statistical model also 1

We present the temperature and polarization angular power spectra measured by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Polarimeter (ACTPol). We analyze night-time data collected during 2013-14 using two detector arrays at 149 GHz, from 548 deg 2 of sky on the celestial equator. We use these spectra, and the spectra measured with the MBAC camera on ACT from 2008-10, in combination with Planck and WMAP data to estimate cosmological parameters from the temperature, polarization, and temperature-polarization cross-correlations. We find the new ACTPol data to be consistent with the ΛCDM model. The ACTPol temperature-polarization cross-spectrum now provides stronger constraints on multiple parameters than the ACTPol temperature spectrum, including the baryon density, the acoustic peak angular scale, and the derived Hubble constant. The new ACTPol data provide information on damping tail parameters. The joint uncertainty on the number of neutrino species and the primordial helium fraction is reduced by 20% when adding ACTPol to Planck temperature data alone.