Colloq Abstract - M. Bradford
February 28
11:00am Mountain
M. Bradford (NASA/JPL)
Breakthrough Opportunities in the Far-IR to Millimeter: Technical Challenges and New Techniques
Abstract
A large fraction of the total star formation and black hole growth over cosmic time has taken place in dust-obscured regions which are opaque in the optical and near-IR. The far-IR through millimeter waveband accesses this component directly, and this waveband remains a technical frontier in which technical advances can create massive scientific breakthroughs. The prospects are particularly exciting for wideband spectroscopy, which reveals time-history of energy release and heavy element production. This talk will outline the potential of far-IR observations from space, and plans to realize it, including Origins, SPICA, and options in between. As the sensitive detector and readout system for these new missions are developed, they enable ground-based and suborbital pathfinder instruments in the near term. In particular, we are building wide-band spectral survey instruments for the sub-millimeter and millimeter, for both ground and balloon platforms. These spatial-spectral mapping instrument complement the capability of ALMA; in particular we are targeting intensity mapping of atomic fine-structure lines to probe the faint galaxy populations across cosmic history.
