"Studying the physics of inflation through observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background from the Teide Observatory"

In force date
Call year
2020
Investigator
Ricardo Tanausú
Genova Santos
Financial institution
Amount granted to the IAC Consortium
69.990,50 €
Description

The final goal of this project is to guarantee the scientific explotation of the data coming from the QUIJOTE and GroundBIRD experiments, both currently located at the Teide Observatory with the aim of performing highaccuracy observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarisation.The final goal of these observations is the detection of the B-mode signal that may be encoded in the CMB polarisation pattern, and which might have been imprinted by the gravitational waves generated during the inflationary epoch of the primordial Universe.

This detection would ultimately confirm that inflation really occurred and would give information about related physical processes, thence proving important insight about aspects related with the current standard cosmological model that are yet not very well understood. The energy scale of inflation may have been much higher than the maximum energies reachable in Earth laboratories (like the LHC at CERN), and therefore these observations may eventually allow to access unexplored physical processes, or even unveil new particles, new force types or even new spatial dimensions. Therefore the discovery of this signal may have a significant impact not only on Cosmology but on Fundamental Physics.

Related projects
The QUIJOTE experiment at the Teide Observatory
QUIJOTE CMB Experiment (Q-U-I JOint TEnerife CMB Experiment)
QUIJOTE es un programa de dos telescopios y su batería de instrumentos, instalados en el Observatorio del Teide, dedicados fundamentalmente a la caracterización de la polarización del Fondo Cósmico de Microondas, en el rango de frecuencias de 10-42 GHz.
José Alberto
Rubiño Martín
Full-sky map showing the spatial distribution of the primary anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (generated 380,000 years after the Big Bang) derived from observations of the Planck satellite
Anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background
The general goal of this project is to determine and characterize the spatial and spectral variations in the temperature and polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background in angular scales from several arcminutes to several degrees. The primordial matter density fluctuations which originated the structure in the matter distribution of the present
Rafael
Rebolo López