Keith L. Thompson Home Page

Dr. Keith L. Thompson

NOTE: I update this page once every 3 or 4 (or 5?) years. So don't be surprised if things seem out of date.

current position: research scientist working with Prof. Chao-Lin Kuo and company.

Formerly a research scientist, upgraded from postdoc, under Prof. Sarah Church. Started at Stanford as a postdoc under the late Prof. Jeff Willick. Before that, a member of the Projects Group at the (late) Royal Greenwich Observatory in Cambridge, England; a postdoc under Dr. Beverley Wills at U.T. Austin; an NRC Research Associate working with Dr. Jackie Fischer at NRL; and a postdoc with the VLBI group at Caltech, backwards in time. Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin, undergrad at Cornell.

Interests
  • Current Projects
    • Sundry contributions to the Keck CMB polarization experiment to be sent to the South Pole late 2010. Direct descendant of the BICEP experiment, sister to BICEP-II (the eldest), and SPIDER (the youngest).
    • POLAR-1, a prototype South Pole CMB polarization telescope, aimed at mapping the lensing contribution to the B-mode CMB polariation.
    • SISP - Stanford Imaging Spectropolarimeter: an optical transition-edge sensor, photon counting, spectrally sensitive polarimeter. An upgreade of OpTES, the instrument developed by Prof. Blas Cabrera's group in collaboration with Prof. Roger Romani, who provides the astronomical motivation with pulsars and other rapidly variable, compact targets.
    • QUIET (Q/U Imaging Experiment) , a new cosmic microwave background telescope project that replaced CBI in Chile. The Church group at Stanford have been responsible for the telescope. See Pictures at an Integration at Caltech where we integrated the telescope, deck, and Q-band receiver in Spring of 2008.
    • Upgrades at the Stanford Student Observatory
  • Recent Projects
    • Measuring the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect with SuZIE-II ("Sunyaev-Zeldovich Infrared Experiment", though "infrared" is a stretch). See http://www.stanford.edu/~schurch/suzie.html
    • Building the next generation SZ instrument: SuZIE-III. At right is a picture of the cryostat under construction. July 2006: first observing run. See also Sarah's page.
    • Optical and mechanical assistance with QUaD ( QUEST on DASI), a CMB polarization experiement now deployed at the South Pole.
    • Stanford Cluster Search Realistically, this project has ended, though there is still one more candidate, with a redshift estimated at 1.0 or greater, to be confirmed.
    • High redshift QSO properties
  • Other Instrumentation
    • see first light images from Ingrid the infrared camera for William Herschel Telescope that I worked on while at RGO, taken over by Chris Packham and the team at La Palma in the Canary Islands. (or just see M100 which I pinched from Chris' web site.)
    • Optical imaging spectroscopy: new design concept, hopefully to be implemented soon in hardware. Goal: galaxy cluster velocity distribution in one observation.

Other sundry info

© K.L.Thompson, 2004,2005,2010