Ted Bunn’s Blog

I’m part of a group that’s building MBI, a new telescope for studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation. MBI will function as both an interferometer (that’s what the I stands for) and an imaging telescope, using ultrasensitive bolometric detector’s (that’s the B). My main jobs with this project is calculating the sensitivity of the instrument, so that we can optimize the design to achieve our science goals, and to examine the effects of various systematic errors on the proposed design. I also worked out some other technical issues regarding analysis of interferometric data.

Brent Follin, one of the research students in my group, has been working on figuring out the optimal pattern of phase shifts to apply to the interferometer inputs in order to extract all of the useful information at the outputs. Here’s a poster about Brent’s work.

Other students in my group are exploring various methods for diagnosing dust contamination in microwave background maps. We’ve been focusing particularly on the use of wavelets. Whitney Brooks, Ben Rybolt, and Spencer Guest have all been involved in this work over the past year or so. Here are a couple of recent posters about their work. Whitney and Ben also described their research in videos.

Another U.R. undergraduate, Austin Bourdon, has been examining possible explanations for large-angle anomalies in the microwave background. The signifance of these anomalies has been hotly debated in the literature. We are carefully examining the viability of various proposed sources of the anomalies.

Another topic I’ve focused on lately is alternative theories of gravity known as f(R) theories. I’ve also done some work recently on the possibility of detecting ultra-large-scale variations in the distribution of matter in the Universe by observing the scattering of microwave background radiation in distant galaxy clusters.