The South Pole Telescope: Latest Results and Future Prospects

The South Pole Telescope is a 10 meter telescope optimized for sensitive, high-resolution measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy and millimeter-wavelength sky. In November 2011, the SPT completed the 2500 deg2 SPT-SZ survey. The survey has led to several major cosmological results, derived from measurements of the fine angular scale primary and secondary CMB anisotropies, the discovery of galaxy clusters via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect and the resulting mass-limited cluster catalog, and the discovery of a population of distant, dusty star forming galaxies (DSFGs). In January 2012, the SPT was equipped with a new polarization sensitive camera, SPTpol, which will enable detection of the contribution to the CMB polarization power spectrum from lensing by large scale structure (the so-called “lensing B-modes”) and, on larger angular scales, a detection or improved upper limit on the primordial inflationary signal (“gravitational-wave B-modes”), thereby constraining the energy scale of Inflation. Development is underway for SPT-3G, the third-generation camera for SPT. The SPT-3G survey will cross the threshold from statistical detection of B-mode CMB lensing to imaging the fluctuations at high signal-to-noise; enabling the separation of lensing and inflationary B-modes and improving the constraint on the sum of the neutrino masses Σmν to a level relevant for exploring the neutrino mass hierarchy.