Astro Seminar Series - VIA ZOOM

Neelima Sehgal is an Associate Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Stony Brook University.  She studies the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is the oldest light in the Universe, to determine what happened during the early Universe and to discover the properties of neutrinos and dark matter. She received her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Yale University and her PhD in Physics and Astronomy from Rutgers University.   She was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and Princeton Universities before joining the faculty at Stony Brook in 2012.  Her research is currently funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Talk Title and Abstract:

Mapping Dark Matter on Large and Small Scales with the Cosmic Microwave Background

In this talk I will discuss the next frontier of research on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): precisely measuring the gravitational lensing of the CMB.  This CMB lensing signal encodes a wealth of statistical information about the distribution of matter in the Universe, which is sensitive to the total mass of the neutrinos, the nature of dark energy, and the particle properties of dark matter.    I will discuss new results using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, and forecasts for the upcoming AdvACT, Simons Observatory, and CMB-S4 experiments. I will also discuss a novel and powerful way to probe dark matter particle properties using very high resolution CMB lensing measurements, and a new experiment being developed, called CMB-HD, that can achieve this science.

Would you like to join this Zoom seminar?  Please email Donna Hayes.