The CMB Foregrounds conference brought together almost 80 international researchers to analyze the current state of research which is trying to detect primordial gravitational waves. The relevance of these waves is that they should have been generated only a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and if detected they would be a strong support to the standard model of modern cosmology.
The Director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Rafael Rebolo, stated that CMB Foregrounds had generated new opportunities for communication between the IAC team and international research centres. Rebolo said that thanks to this conference “The Quijote experiment, sited at the Teide Observatory, and in the front line in the analysis of the cosmic background radiation from ground-based sites, will be amplified with collaborations with institutions in Japan, with the University of Milan, and with the University of Oxford.
Jose Alberto Rubiño, the Principal Investigator of the RADIOFOREGROUNDS project at the IAC, and organizer of this meeting pointed out that “The new maps obtained with the QUIJOTE experiment, presented during the course of this week, show the high degree of complexity in the physical processes which produce the radio emission of our Galaxy in the microwave range; synchrotron radiation and the anomalous microwave emission. Understanding these emissions is necessary to be able to remove this veil which tends to hide the radiation reaching us from the primordial universe” He also noted that this complexity has to be considered during the studies for the design and planning of the new generation of experiments on the cosmic microwave backgrouind whose aim is to look for the traces of the primordial gravitational waves produced in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
Some of the participants in the conference have continued their scientific discussion during Fridayh of this week, in a working meeting held at the IAC, dedicated entirely to the characterization of the anomalous microwave emission, a new emission process in whose identification the Tenerife and COSMOSOMAS experiments were pioneers, and which experiments such as QUIJOTE are now helping to reveal and characterize.
Previous press release: Congreso internacional sobre radiación de fondo cósmico de microondas en Tenerife
More information:
CMB-Foregrounds: http://www.iac.es/congreso/cmbforegrounds18/
RADIOFOREGROUNDS: http://www.radioforegrounds.eu/
YouTube video: RADIOFOREGROUNDS (https://youtu.be/7UOsBQxbQlI)
Contact at the IAC:
- José Alberto Rubiño (jalberto [at] iac.es (jalberto[at]iac[dot]es))
- Beatriz Ruiz-Granados (bearg [at] iac.es (bearg[at]iac[dot]es))
- Flavien Vansyngel (flavien [at] iac.es (flavien[at]iac[dot]es))
- Frederic Poidevin (fpoidevin [at] iac.es (fpoidevin[at]iac[dot]es))
- Federica Guidi (fguidi [at] iac.es (fguidi[at]iac[dot]es))
- Ricardo Génova (rgs [at] iac.es (rgs[at]iac[dot]es))
