Prospects for next generation Cosmic Microwave Background experiments

Gianfranco De Zotti

Although Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, and notably the highly successful WMAP and Planck space missions, have put on a solid basis the so-called standard cosmological model and have yielded very accurate determinations of its basic parameters, the information content of the CMB has not been fully exploited yet. In particular, Planck can be considered the definitive mission about CMB temperature anisotropies on scales ≥ 5 arcmin. However, the sensitivity of Planck to CMB polarization was not sufficient to extract all the information carried by it. To get such information we need polarization measurements one or more orders of magnitude better than Planck. The present Holy Grail is the detection of B-mode polarization that would provide a direct test of the notion of cosmological inflation, which is at the basis of the overwhelming majority of current models of the early Universe. The importance of this scientific goal has triggered a lot of ground-based, sub-orbital and space-borne projects.
The plan of this lecture is the following. Section 2 contains a synthetic review of the accurate measurements of CMB temperature anisotropies provided by the Planck satellite and of their cosmological implications. Section 3 deals with CMB polarization anisotropies. Section 4 gives a short description of the main ongoing or planned next generation CMB experiments. Finally, Sect. 5 summarizes the main conclusions.

Proceedings of the Polish Astronomical Society, vol. 9, 151-165 (2019)

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