We describe the design of a new polarization sensitive receiver, spt-3g, for the 10-meter South Pole Telescope (spt). The spt-3g receiver will deliver a factor of ∼20 improvement in mapping speed over the current receiver, spt-pol. The sensitivity of the spt-3g receiver will enable the advance from statistical detection of B-mode polarization anisotropy power to high signal-to-noise measurements of the individual modes, i.e., maps. This will lead to precise (∼0.06 eV) constraints on the sum of neutrino masses with the potential to directly address the neutrino mass hierarchy. It will allow a separation of the lensing and inflationary B-mode power spectra, improving constraints on the amplitude and shape of the primordial signal, either through spt-3g data alone or in combination with bicep2/keck, which is observing the same area of sky. The measurement of small-scale temperature anisotropy will provide new constraints on the epoch of reionization. Additional science from the spt-3g survey will be significantly enhanced by the synergy with the ongoing optical Dark Energy Survey (des), including: a 1% constraint on the bias of optical tracers of large-scale structure, a measurement of the differential Doppler signal from pairs of galaxy clusters that will test General Relativity on ∼200 Mpc scales, and improved cosmological constraints from the abundance of clusters of galaxies.

We present measurements of the E-mode (EE) polarization power spectrum and temperature-E-mode (TE) cross-power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background using data collected by SPT-3G, the latest instrument installed on the South Pole Telescope. This analysis uses observations of a 1500 deg 2 region at 95, 150, and 220 GHz taken over a four-month period in 2018. We report binned values of the EE and TE power spectra over the angular multipole range 300 ≤ l < 3000, using the multifrequency data to construct six semi-independent estimates of each power spectrum and their minimum-variance combination. These measurements improve upon the previous results of SPTpol across the multipole ranges 300 ≤ l ≤ 1400 for EE and 300 ≤ l ≤ 1700 for TE, resulting in constraints on cosmological parameters comparable to those from other current leading ground-based experiments. We find that the SPT-3G data set is well fit by a ΛCDM cosmological model with parameter constraints consistent with those from Planck and SPTpol data. From SPT-3G data alone, we find H 0 ¼ 68.8 AE 1.5 km s −1 Mpc −1 and σ 8 ¼ 0.789 AE 0.016, with a gravitational lensing amplitude consistent with the ΛCDM prediction (A L ¼ 0.98 AE 0.12). We combine the SPT-3G and the Planck data sets and obtain joint constraints on the ΛCDM model. The volume of the 68% confidence region in six-dimensional ΛCDM parameter space is reduced by a factor of 1.5 compared to Planck-only constraints, with no significant shifts in central values. We note that the results presented here are obtained from data collected during just half of a typical observing season with only part of the focal plane operable, and that the active detector count has since nearly doubled for observations made with SPT-3G after 2018.

High angular resolution cosmic microwave background experiments provide a unique opportunity to conduct a survey of time-variable sources at millimeter wavelengths, a population that has primarily been understood through follow-up measurements of detections in other bands. Here we report the first results of an astronomical transient survey with the South Pole Telescope (SPT) using the SPT-3G camera to observe 1500 deg 2 of the southern sky. The observations took place from 2020 March to November in three bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. This survey yielded the detection of 15 transient events from sources not previously detected by the SPT. The majority

SPT-3G is the third survey receiver operating on the South Pole Telescope dedicated to high-resolution observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Sensitive measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the CMB provide a powerful data set for constraining cosmology. Additionally, CMB surveys with arcminute-scale resolution are capable of detecting galaxy clusters, millimeter-wave bright galaxies, and a variety of transient phenomena. The SPT-3G instrument provides a significant improvement in mapping speed over its predecessors, SPT-SZ and SPTpol. The broadband optics design of the instrument achieves a 430 mm diameter image plane across observing bands of 95, 150, and 220 GHz, with 1.2′ FWHM beam response at 150 GHz. In the receiver, this image plane is populated with 2690 dual-polarization, trichroic pixels (∼16,000 detectors) read out using a 68× digital frequency-domain multiplexing readout system. In 2018, SPT-3G began a multiyear survey of 1500 deg2 of the southern sky. We summarize the unique optical, cryogenic, detector, and readout technologies employed in SPT-3G, and we report on the integrated performance of the instrument.

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