Postdoctoral Fellowship: AAPF: Getting to the Point: Building robust pointing models to achieve the calibration demands of inflationary science at the Simons Observatory.

Elle Shaw is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the University of Texas at Austin. Shaw will work toward modeling, characterizing, and eliminating pointing errors on the Simons Observatory (SO) Small Aperture Telescopes (SATs). This work will contribute to lowering the overall instrumental systematic uncertainties, allowing for tighter constraints on cosmological measurements. The project will also expand the educational activities available within the Simons Observatory Virtual Reality Exhibition (SOVRE), a virtual tour of the observatory, which will be presented at a K-8 STEM festival. A positive detection of primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) would confirm the inflationary paradigm and fill gaps in the standard cosmological model, resolving the horizon, flatness, and magnetic monopole problems. The SO SAT program is prepared to place the most stringent constraints on the cosmological parameters that distinguish among various inflationary models. To do so will require exquisite control over instrumental systematic effects that will otherwise limit the program’s efficacy. Shaw will address one of the key challenges of that effort: the pointing calibration of six separate telescope platforms and the 60,000 detectors among them. The proposed work will advance the field by demonstrating high-precision pointing calibration across multiple pointing platforms, and SO will be poised to set the tightest constraints on cosmic inflation yet, through the reduction of instrumental systematics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.