Probing cosmology with diffuse microwave and radio observations

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Cosmology is the study of the physical universe and our place in it. The questions being addressed are profound: How old is the universe? How did it begin? How will it end? Is it finite or infinite? Remarkably, we live in a time when these questions are starting to be answered. A mere decade ago we had only rudimentary knowledge of the age and fate of our universe. Today, thanks to precise observations from an array of high-technology instrumentation, we know the age of the universe to better than 1%: 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years. We know the contents of the universe are dominated by dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Ordinary atomic matter makes up only 4% of the universe. To the best of our knowledge, the universe is infinite (or at least very large) and it will continue expanding forever, indeed at an ever-faster rate. This progress has been made possible by a wide range of observations with special purpose instrumentation. Arguably, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is the experiment that has been most responsible for the advances of the past decade, making WMAP the most-cited experiment in all of science in the past few years. With this Discovery proposal, and as a new Canadian faculty member, I seek funds to continue a vigorous research program in observational cosmology. I plan to lead and/or contribute to the following experiments: - Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) - A NASA mission to measure the CMB; - The Canadian Galactic Emission Mapper (CGEM) - A ground-based experiment (PI-Hinshaw) to map diffuse radio emission at 10 and 15 GHz, in support of CMB polarization measurements. - The Cosmological Large-Angular-Scale Surveyor (CLASS) - A ground-based experiment (PI-Bennett) to measure large-scale CMB polarization at 40, 90, and 150 GHz. - The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) - A ground-based experiment to map the cosmic matter distribution via hydrogen gas, to probe dark energy.