Abstract:
The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect was first proposed in 1970, but it took until the 1990s before SZ observations became possible without enormous effort. However, the resolution of these observations were always above an arcminute, and thus SZ measurements were primarily sought for determining global properties of the…

I will discuss topics related to foregrounds of two different CMB science cases. For the first part, I will introduce an expansion to foreground SED parameterizations in terms of moments of the parameter distributions. I will then discuss a power spectrum based foreground cleaning algorithm for the Simons Observatory B-mode analysis pipeline…

As cosmological measurements increase in precision, foregrounds are increasingly problematic. One foreground that's possible to reduce is Earth's atmosphere. I will talk about experiments that use stratospheric balloons to achieve higher sensitivity and lower systematic errors than are possible on the ground, and at much lower cost than in…

The interstellar medium (ISM) is multi-phase, turbulent, and magnetic. This makes the ISM an ideal laboratory for studying the multi-scale physics of star formation and galactic evolution. This also makes the ISM a formidable foreground for cosmology experiments, such as the search for inflationary gravitational wave B-mode polarization in the…

The Planck collaboration is in the process of delivering the "Planck results 2018" papers and data. The improvement of the map making will be described together with a new set of maps with some improvements for polarization at large scales. The consequences for the cosmological parameters are driven by a new determination of the reionization…

This talk will be an elementary introduction to cosmological theories that replace the big bang with a smooth, classical transition from contraction to expansion in order to address many of the fundamental problems of cosmology.

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One of the main goals of modern observational cosmology is to constrain or detect a stochastic background of primordial gravitational waves. Realizing this goal will rely on highly accurate measurements of the B-mode signature in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). I will give a brief overview of a particular dedicated B-mode experiment: the…

The tension between measurements of the Hubble constant (H0) as determined from the "local" and "distant" Universe persists. The Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program was designed to provide a calibration of the Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) completely independent of the Leavitt Law for Cepheid variables. Our use of distances determined via the tip of…

In even the cleanest regions of the sky, polarized emission from our Galaxy is a limiting contaminant for the detection of primordial gravitational waves via a B-mode polarization signature in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). In this talk, I will first review the physics of dust polarization and present models of the physical properties…

We show how kSZ tomography measures a bispectrum containing a cosmological power spectrum of the velocity field and an astrophysical power spectrum of the electron density. While these are degenerate up to an overall amplitude, scale-dependent effects on large scales are much better constrained by the inclusion of kSZ on top of galaxy…

The main purpose of this talk is to describe, by way of a concrete example, how the field of numerical relativity contributes to our understanding of asymptotically AdS spacetimes. I will begin by motivating these studies in terms of gauge/gravity duality, heavy ion physics, and gravitational collapse. I will then describe in detail results…

We motivate the study of modified gravity theories and the role these modifications may play in addressing open questions about the formation and structure of black holes.

We discuss theoretical challenges in studying modified gravity theories and outline current work on a numerical study of gravitational collapse and black hole…

On galactic scales, structure is gravitationally held by dark matter, while stars and  gas present merely an “icing on the cake.” In spite of their dominance over the matter budget in the universe, particle constituents of dark matter have eluded detection and characterization to the present day. This talk will focus on a variety of promising…