Cosmic Information from the Microwave Background & Cosmic Web

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Over the past 35 years (!) my group has shown that primary cosmic background radiation (CMB) anisotropies are the key observables for elucidating the correct structure formation theory, and precision values of cosmological parameters that define it, such as the dark energy, dark matter, baryon and neutrino densities, the amplitude and slope of the spectrum of primordial fluctuations, including gravity waves, the average spatial curvature of the Universe, early and late inflation constraints, including on primordial non-Gaussianities in the spatial curvature. I have been involved in Planck since 1993, as a Planck coI and Canadian Space Agency PI since 2001. Analyzing our Planck results has been my primary focus over the past grant cycle, with major releases of data products and results in 2011, 2013 and 2015, and more work for the next 2017 releases, and beyond): our Canadian group has had a major impact on the cornucopia of influential Planck papers covering all of the cosmological topics listed above. Our Chile-based Atacama CMB Cosmology telescope extended the results to higher resolution. Over the next five years the outpouring of cosmic data will greatly enhance, from CMB and large scale structure (LSS) and other probes, including much more from secondary CMB anisotropies involving nonlinear physics. My group will be in the thick of it, as team members on LSS surveys (the redshifted-21cm BAO experiment CHIME, carbon monoxide and CII intensity mapping experiments, ESA’s EUCLID), as well as CMB experiments (the balloon-borne Spider, since 2005, Advanced ACTpol followed by the Simons Observatory and then the ambitious DOE-based CMB Stage 4).