MG12 - Talk detail
 

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 Participant 

Institution

Session

Talk

Abstract

The Birth Pangs of the Big Bang in the Light of BICEP

BICEP is the first polarimeter developed to measure the inflationary B-mode polarization of the CMB at degree angular scales. During three seasons of observing at the South Pole, Antarctica beginning in 2006, BICEP mapped 2% of the sky chosen to be clean of polarized foreground emission. In this session I will present initial results derived from a subset of the data acquired during the first two years and discuss the unique design feature of BICEP which led to the first meaningful limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio to come from B-mode polarization. I will discuss potential systematic errors and demonstrate that they are sub-dominant to statistical errors. I will conclude with a discussion demonstrating how BICEP's design and results will inform future measurements of the inflationary gravitational wave background.

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