Design Development of Innovative High Throughput CMB Telescope for the South Pole

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The search for a background of Primordial Gravitational Waves (PGW, presumably generated by cosmic inflation) is one of the most compelling goals in cosmology and physics today. A detection of PGW would open a new window to fundamental physics at an energy scale inaccessible to terrestrial experiments and provide insight into the quantum nature of gravity. This detection or a sufficiently strong upper limit on the PGW signal in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) would give us new insights into the currently favored paradigm for the origin of the Universe, the theory of cosmic inflation. The proposed research activity will also contribute to training the next generation of scientists by integrating graduate and undergraduate education with the technology development, astronomical observations, and scientific analyses CMB data. This award is to support the design and development of the South Pole three mirror anastigmat telescope (SPTMA), which is an innovative millimeter-wave telescope that would significantly advance the search for PGWs by providing the significant throughput and necessary control of systematics needed to achieve this challenging goal. SPTMA is critical to the advancement of the program of ultra-sensitive CMB measurements, providing a field of view 20 times larger than that of the current South Pole 10-m Telescope (3.5 sq. deg.) by utilizing larger arrays of detectors and improved raw sensitivity. The 5-meter aperture diameter of the SPTMA's primary monolithic mirror will provide 1.6 arcminute resolution at 2-mm wavelength, which is well matched to the requirements for next-generation measurements of primary and secondary CMB anisotropy, including CMB-lensing reconstruction of the distribution of all the mass in the Universe. In addition to enabling measurements of the most distant and exotic signals (especially B-mode signal induced on the CMB by PGWs), the SPTMA will enable key contributions to multi-wavelength and multi-messenger astronomy and astrophysics from our galaxy through the high redshift Universe. This project advances the goals of the NSF Windows on the Universe Big Idea.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.