Far out cosmology: Polarbear (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 22, 2014, 15:46 (3683 days ago) @ David Turell

There is another method to study CMB polarization than Biceps2, fully discussed in this article, as well as the Planck satellite findings:-http://phys.org/news/2014-10-polarbear-cosmic-microwave-polarization.html-"The POLARBEAR team, which uses microwave detectors mounted on the Huan Tran Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, consists of more than 70 researchers from around the world. They submitted their new paper to the journal one week before the surprising March 17 announcement by a rival group, the BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) experiment, that they had found the holy grail of microwave background research. That team reported finding the signature of cosmic inflation - a rapid ballooning of the universe when it was a fraction of a fraction of a second old - in the polarization pattern of the microwave background radiation.
 
"Subsequent observations, such as those announced last month by the Planck satellite, have since thrown cold water on the BICEP2 results, suggesting that they did not detect what they claimed to detect.
 
"While POLARBEAR may eventually confirm or refute the BICEP2 results, so far it has focused on interpreting the polarization pattern of the microwave background to map the distribution of matter back in time to the universe's inflationary period, 380,000 years after the Big Bang."