Speaker
Description
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter millimeter-wavelength telescope located at the geographic South Pole, one of the world’s premier sites for millimeter-wave observations. The SPT has been used to conduct several generations of wide-field high resolution cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys including the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ survey, the SPTpol 500d and ECS surveys, and the SPT-3G survey. One of the primary objectives of these surveys has been the construction of mass-limited samples of galaxy clusters identified via the thermal Sunyaev- Zel’dovich (SZ) effect, through which massive clusters imprint subtle temperature distortions on the CMB. The abundance of such clusters is a powerful cosmological probe as it depends sensitively upon both the expansion history of the universe and the growth of density fluctuations. In this talk I will discuss progress in the construction of the SZ cluster samples from SPT-3G, particularly focusing on results from the main survey for which over 6,000 SZ clusters are expected in the 1500-square-degree survey.
