Cosmological Constraints from the South Pole Telescope Galaxy Cluster Survey

Download or read book Cosmological Constraints from the South Pole Telescope Galaxy Cluster Survey written by Tijmen de Haan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10 m telescope located at the geographic south pole. From February of 2007 to November of 2011, we used the SPT to perform a a five year survey of 2500 square degrees of the southern sky in millimeter waves. In this thesis, we describe work on the SPT project, such as digital feedback techniques for bolometer readout that are enabling next-generation instruments, including an implementation that is currently in use on the SPT. We discuss the 2500 square degree dataset, how to filter the data, generate maps, and extract a catalog of galaxy clusters. Using this list of hundreds of SPT-selected galaxy clusters we constrain cosmological parameters, noting that the scale of underlying cluster masses is the dominant systematic error. We present a novel Bayesian method for jointly fitting cosmological parameters as well as an arbitrary number of observable-mass scaling relations, in a computationally efficient way. Using this method, we compute constraints on cosmological models." --