Jamie Bock to Speak on BICEP2 Experiment

On Thursday, March 20, 2014, Jamie Bock, professor of physics at Caltech and senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will be giving a talk on the BICEP2 experiment and its recent detection of B-mode polarization indicating the effect of gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The BICEP experiments began in 2002 as a collaboration between Bock and the late Andrew Lange, the former Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Physics at Caltech.

Bock will review data from BICEP2 observations at the South Pole conducted over three observing seasons from 2010 to 2012. He will describe the BICEP-2 experiment, discuss how the observations were undertaken and how the data were processed, and will explain why the BICEP2 team is confident that its finding is that of a strong B-mode polarization in the CMB, evidence of cosmic inflation and of primordial gravitational waves.

This talk is part of Caltech's regular weekly Physics Research Conference series. It will be held at 4 p.m. in the Feynman Lecture Hall, 201 East Bridge on the Caltech campus.