The microwaves produced shortly after the Big Bang have traveled across nearly the entire visible universe before reaching the Earth today, their paths having been slightly deflected by the gravity field of the dark matter encountered along the way. This distortion both encodes valuable information about the dark (and regular) matter, and obscures properties of the Big Bang itself. How best to extract this information and unobscure the earliest moments in time given increasingly precise instrumental measurements is an open question, one which the teams involved in this proposal are uniquely suited to answer via this France-Berkeley collaboration.
UC PI:
Uros Seljak
Department of Physics, UC Berkeley
France PI:
Benjamin Wandelt
Institut Lagrange de Paris