External Correlations of the CMB and Cosmology

The workshop is over!
Many thanks to all of the participants most of
whose talks are now available on the Agenda Page

The Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center will host a workshop on angular / redshift correlations of CMB and LSS: what has been and will be learned about cosmology from these measurements, how to best measure the correlations, and how best to test their significance.

We encourage all who are working on or with these correlations, or any interested in them to attend.

BACKGROUND: Subtle correlations between the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and foreground large scale structure (LSS) provide a new and different window on cosmology than that obtained from CMB and LSS analyzed separately. A variety of physical effects associated with the LSS will cause small changes in the CMB temperature/polarization pattern which in turn induces small but measurable angular correlations between the CMB and the LSS.

effect	property
gravitational lensing	mass
integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect	mass x velocity gradients
kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect	gas mass x velocity
thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect	gas pressure (mass x temperature)

The various effects and the corresponding LSS properties they probe can be differentiated by the angular, redshift, and spectral patterns of the correlations. The different properties are themselves sensitive to the cosmological model in different ways.

It is only with the recent availability of the combination of large area and fine resolution/sampling in overlapping CMB maps (e.g. WMAP) and deep LSS surveys (e.g. SDSS or 2dF) that these small correlations could be measured. In the near future the amount and quality of data for these studies will increase enormously with projects such as ACT, AMiBA, APEX, CFHTLS, DES, LSST, JDEM, Pan-STARRS, Planck, and SPT.

The workshop will cover

current and planned datasets for correlation analysis
measured correlations: past, planned, and prospects for future
theoretical predictions for measurements
cosmological meaning of measured correlations
statistical, data analysis, and modeling techniques