A search for the Standard Model Higgs boson in proton–proton collisions with the ATLAS detector at the LHC is presented. The datasets used correspond to integrated luminosities of approximately 4.8 fb−1 collected at √s=7 TeV in 2011 and 5.8 fb−1 at √s=8 TeV in 2012. Individual searches in the channels H→ZZ(⁎)→4ℓ, H→γγ and H→WW(⁎)→eνμν in the 8 TeV data are combined with previously published results of searches for H→ZZ(⁎), WW(⁎), bb and τ+τ− in the 7 TeV data and results from improved analyses of the H→ZZ(⁎)→4ℓ and H→γγ channels in the 7 TeV data. Clear evidence for the production of a neutral boson with a measured mass of 126.0±0.4(stat)±0.4(sys) GeV is presented. This observation, which has a significance of 5.9 standard deviations, corresponding to a background fluctuation probability of 1.7×10−9, is compatible with the production and decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r) = 0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensorto-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources a .

We present a catalog of galaxy clusters selected via their Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect signature from 2500 deg 2 of South Pole Telescope (SPT) data. This work represents the complete sample of clusters detected at high significance in the 2500 deg 2 SPT-SZ survey, which was completed in 2011. A total of 677 (409) cluster candidates are identified above a signal-to-noise threshold of ξ = 4.5 (5.0). Ground-and space-based optical and near-infrared (NIR) imaging confirms overdensities of similarly colored galaxies in the direction of 516 (or 76%) of the ξ > 4.5 candidates and 387 (or 95%) of the ξ > 5 candidates; the measured purity is consistent with expectations from simulations. Of these confirmed clusters, 415 were first identified in SPT data, including 251 new discoveries reported in this work. We estimate photometric redshifts for all candidates with identified optical and/or NIR counterparts; we additionally report redshifts derived from spectroscopic observations for 141 of these systems. The mass threshold of the catalog is roughly independent of redshift above z ∼ 0.25 leading to a sample of massive clusters that extends to high redshift. The median mass of the sample is M 500c (ρ crit ) ∼ 3.5 × 10 14 M h −1 70 , the median redshift is z med = 0.55, and the highest-redshift systems are at z >1.4. The combination of large redshift extent, clean selection, and high typical mass makes this cluster sample of particular interest for cosmological analyses and studies of cluster formation and evolution.

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