INPA

INPA Seminar- Speaker: Alina Sabyr (Columbia University)
2024-12-06 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
INPA Seminar Talk
Date: December 6, 2024
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132 [Hybrid and In-Person]
Speaker: Alina Sabyr (Columbia University)
Title: Future Cosmology with CMB Spectral Distortions and Secondaries
Abstract: Spectral distortions–small deviations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) energy spectrum from that of a perfect blackbody–probe the physical processes that occur in the primordial Universe (mu-distortion) and at late times (y-distortion). In this talk, I will present a new instrument concept, SPECTER, that we forecast to observe the mu-distortion at high significance while marginalizing over astrophysical foregrounds. Within the standard cosmological model, the mu-distortion is sourced primarily by the energy injected via Silk damping and is thus sensitive to the primordial power spectrum at very small scales. Next, I will present a new constraint on the y-distortion from the re-analysis of the COBE/FIRAS archival data. The known source of the y-distortion is the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect – inverse-Compton scattering of CMB photons off of energetic electrons primarily located in galaxy groups and clusters. Therefore, y-distortion can give tight constraints on the mean ionized gas properties. Finally, upcoming CMB anisotropy experiments will provide high-resolution and low-noise component-separated tSZ maps. I will discuss the cosmological constraining power of several tSZ higher-order statistics. Using a large suite of halo-model-based simulations, we show that there is substantial non-Gaussian information in the tSZ maps that can be extracted in future analyses.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/95016696011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 950 1669 6011

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