|
Speaker |
Keating, Brian |
|
Talk Title |
The Birth Pangs of the Big Bang in the Light of BICEP |
|
Abstract |
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. |
|
Talk view |
|
|
|
|