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D.C.-J. Bock (CARMA), S. Rawlings (Oxford Univ.), F. Abdalla (Univ. College, London)
The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be one of a suite of new, large telescopes for the 21{}\mathrm{st} century probing fundamental physics, the origin and evolution of the Universe, the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the formation and distribution of planets.
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) currently provide ~5-10% accuracy on measurements of cosmological parameters which are set to improve still further in the post-Planck era. However, reaching ~1% precision and extending measurements to provide meaningful constraints on parameters such as the dark energy equation-of-state parameter w and the neutrino mass scale will require additional information from redshift surveys covering a large fraction of the sky to redshifts of order 2. In this poster we argue that the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is the next-generation instrument most likely to provide this dataset via a huge survey of ~1 billion galaxies in redshifted neutral Hydrogen. We demonstrate how the phased build-up of SKA sensitivity will yield redshift survey constraints which become competitive with optical redshift survey experiments over the next decade and become dominant by ~2020. We compare constraints on parameters from post-Planck CMB datasets, SKA datasets and CMB+SKA datasets. We explain how key degeneracies are broken and discuss ways in which other SKA experiments can improve measurement accuracies still further. We discuss the possibility that there will be firm evidence for sterile neutrinos from a combination of CMB+SKA measurements with neutrino experiments.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #4
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.