Studying Inflation and Neutrinos with the Cosmic Microwave Background

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This project aims to image the cosmic microwave background – the oldest light in the Universe – to study what the Universe is made of and how it began. A key mystery in cosmology is what caused inflation: why did the Universe expand exponentially in the first fraction of a second? This project would look for the gravitational wave echoes of inflation to better understand its cause. The project also plans to use gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background to map all mass in the Universe across half the sky. A mass map would be invaluable for measuring the sum of the neutrino masses and testing how structure forms in the Universe.