Building on over a decade of rapid gains in cosmic microwave background (CMB) sensitivity, CMB surveys are now poised to map the millimeter sky with unprecedented depth at arcminute resolution. In this talk, I will discuss how the Simons Observatory (SO) is leading this charge, specifically through the Large Aperture Telescope and its currently observing receiver upgrade, Advanced SO. The SO survey, intends to observe the fine details in the CMB with increased sensitivity, probing the initial conditions of the early universe as well as the formation of structure due to the presence of gas and dark matter. I will highlight how these instrumental leaps enable two distinct searches for new physics: using the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect as a model-independent probe of the gravitational force law, and searching for parity-violating signatures of new particles through cosmic birefringence, the rotation of the CMB polarization as it travels from the surface of last scattering to us throughout the universe.
09/07/2026
Speaker: Patricio Gallardo
Institution: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania
Date: Thursday July 9, 2026
Time: 4:00pm
Location: Aula Majorana, Dept. of Physics, Sapienza University