Patricio Gallardo

KICP Fellow


Background

Ph.D., Physics, Cornell University, 2019

Research

I have 10 years of experience in cosmic microwave back-ground instrumentation, as I started working with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration in 2010, while I was an undergraduate student in electrical engineering in Chile. After graduation in Chile (B.Sc.) I worked on the assembly of the ACTPol instrument, the first polarization-sensitive receiver on ACT, at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Mark Devlin. Subsequently, I worked at the high site deploying ACTPol and operating the Atacama B-mode Search (ABS) instrument. In 2013 I joined Michael Niemack’s group at Cornell University where I pursued my Ph.D. studies in physics graduating in 2019. During my Ph.D. I worked on various aspects of instrument development, improving mapping speed for future surveys like the Simons Observatory. I also worked optimizing noise characteristics of transition-edge sensor bolometer systems that were deployed in Advanced ACTPol. On data analysis I developed the pipeline that allowed the measurement of movements of groups of galaxies using the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect with data from ACT, which led to a six-sigma detection, the highest significance to date with this technique. As a postdoctoral researcher I have contributed to developing the highest throughput six-meter class telescope designs ever built and I plan to continue advancing that work for CMB-S4. I will also develop statistical methods to enable future detections of the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect with increased precision. This will be needed in the future, as the Simons Observatory, DESI and CMB-S4 will deliver rich and complex datasets that will vastly improve future detections.

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