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 present new arcminute-resolution maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropy from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, using data taken from 2013–2016 at 98 and 150 GHz. The maps cover more than 17,000 deg2, the deepest 600 deg2 with noise levels below 10μK-arcmin. We use the power spectrum derived from almost 6,000 deg2 of these maps to constrain cosmology. The ACT data enable a measurement of the angular scale of features in both the divergence-like polarization and the temperature anisotropy, tracing both the velocity and density at last-scattering. From these one can derive the distance to the last-scattering surface and thus infer the local expansion rate, H 0. By combining ACT data with large-scale information from WMAP we measure H 0=67.6± 1.1 km/s/Mpc, at 68% confidence, in excellent agreement with the independently-measured Planck satellite estimate (from ACT alone we find H 0=67.9± 1.5 km/s/Mpc). The ΛCDM model provides a good fit to the ACT data, and we find no evidence for deviations: both the spatial curvature, and the departure from the standard lensing signal in the spectrum, are zero to within 1σ; the number of relativistic species, the primordial Helium fraction, and the running of the spectral index are consistent with ΛCDM predictions to within 1.5–2.2σ. We compare ACT, WMAP, and Planck at the parameter level and find good consistency; we investigate how the constraints on the correlated spectral index and baryon density parameters readjust when adding CMB large-scale information that ACT does not measure. The DR4 products presented here will be publicly released on the NASA Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis.

We explore how radiative cooling, supernova feedback, cosmic rays, and a new model of the energetic feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGNs) affect the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) power spectra. To do this, we use a suite of hydrodynamical TreePM-SPH simulations of the cosmic web in large periodic boxes and tailored higher resolution simulations of individual galaxy clusters. Our AGN feedback simulations match the recent universal pressure profile and cluster mass scaling relations of the REXCESS X-ray cluster sample better than previous analytical or numerical approaches. For multipoles 2000, our power spectra with and without enhanced feedback are similar, suggesting that theoretical uncertainties over that range are relatively small, although current analytic and semi-analytic approaches overestimate this SZ power. We find the power at high 2000-10,000 multipoles in which the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and South Pole Telescope (SPT) probe is sensitive to the feedback prescription, and hence can constrain the theory of intracluster gas, in particular for the highly uncertain redshifts >0.8. The apparent tension between σ 8 from primary cosmic microwave background power and from analytic SZ spectra inferred using ACT and SPT data is lessened with our AGN feedback spectra.Key words: black hole physics -cosmic background radiation -cosmology: theory -galaxies: clusters: generallarge-scale structure of universe -methods: numerical Online-only material: color figures SZ POWER TEMPLATES AND THE OVERCOOLING PROBLEMWhen cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons are Compton scattered by hot electrons, they gain energy, giving a spectral decrement in thermodynamic temperature below ν ≈ 220 GHz, and an excess above (Sunyaev & Zeldovich 1970). The high electron pressures in the intracluster medium (ICM) result in cluster gas dominating the effect. The integrated signal is proportional to the cluster thermal energy and the differential signal probes the pressure profile. The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) sky is therefore an effective tool for constraining the internal physics of clusters and cosmic parameters associated with the growth of structure, in particular the rms amplitude of the (linear) density power spectrum on cluster-mass scales σ 8 (e.g., Birkinshaw 1999;Carlstrom et al. 2002). Identifying clusters through blind SZ surveys and measuring the SZ power spectrum have been long-term goals in CMB research, and are reaching fruition through the South Pole Telescope (SPT; Lueker et al. 2010) and Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT; Fowler et al. 2010) experiments. The ability to determine cosmological parameters from these SZ measurements is limited by the systematic uncertainty in theoretical modeling of the underlying cluster physics and hence of the SZ power spectrum. The power contribution due to the kinetic SZ (kSZ) effect that arises from ionized gas motions with respect to the CMB rest frame adds additional uncertainty.There are two main approaches to theoretical computations of the th...