THE VERY SMALL ARRAY: LATEST RESULTS AND FUTURE PLANS
Abstract
The VSA is an aperture synthesis array dedicated to measuring anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). It has observed in two configurations to measure the CMB power spectrum from ℓ=150–1600, detecting the first three acoustic peaks at good signal-to-noise. We now plan to enhance the telescope to allow observation at higher ℓ. This will allow measurement of the fourth and subsequent peaks and will allow us to break degeneracies that exist at present between cosmological parameters. In addition we will investigate the excess power detected by CBI at ℓ > 2000 and will conduct high-sensitivity searches for topological defects.