Stony Brook University
7:30 pm
ESS Building, Room 001
Friday, Aril 04, 2025
Discoveries from the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Oldest Light in the Universe
Prof. Neelima Sehgal
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments have contributed powerful constraints on the fundamental properties of the Universe. Upcoming CMB experiments such as the Simons Observatory and CMB-S4 are poised to extend this progress even further. However, CMB experiments still have a wealth of information to offer beyond near-term facilities regarding the properties of dark matter, the birth of the Universe, and the Universe’s particle inventory. In particular, a much lower-noise and higher-resolution wide-area CMB survey can open a new window on fundamental physics and astrophysics. I will discuss CMB-HD, a next-generation CMB facility with three times lower noise and six times higher resolution than the CMB-S4 wide-area survey, as well as the discoveries it can enable.
Prof. Neelima Sehgal is a Cosmologist in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Stony Brook. She studies the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is the oldest light in the Universe, to determine what happened during the first few fractions of a second after the Big Bang. She also studies the Cosmic Microwave Background to discover the properties of neutrinos, dark matter, and dark energy. 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.
