CMB-S4

S4Logo

CMB-Stage 4 (S4) is a planned CMB mega observatory that will be funded by the US Department of Energy and will conglomerate the majority of US CMB scientists into a single project.

expt_progress — A plot of the sensitivity of CMB experiments over the years. In the early 2000’s, WMAP’s measurements of the CMB temperature fluctuations was the hallmark of modern cosmology. CMB-S4 will be 1,000 times more sensitive than WMAP and nearly 10 times better than the cutting-edge experiments of the 2010s. Figure credit: CMB-S4 Science Book

S4 is designed to be the ultimate ground-based CMB experiment, fielding ~500,000 detectors at locations around the globe. S4 will place fundamental limits on many aspects of cosmology, including inflationary physics, cosmic neutrinos, dark matter, dark energy, galaxy evolution, and reionization, to name a few. As of 2020, S4 is in the early stages of cost forecasting and technological surveying, but the first wave of observations are proposed to begin in mid-2020’s.

My involvement in CMB-S4 was primarily focused on contributions to the CMB-S4 Instrument Technical Papers, specifically writing about optics, polarization modulators, and broad-stroke detector array optimization. The technologies I developed for Simons Array and Simons Observatory provide an experimental platform to validate emerging technologies for S4 as it begins to take form.

For more information about CMB-S4, visit its website!