DR. SHANTANU DESAI

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10m mm wave telescope located at the South Pole and has completed a 3-band mm-wave survey of 2500 square degrees in November 2011. The main goal of this survey is to detect galaxy clusters using the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and use these clusters for a variety of astrophysical and cosmological studies. Since 2005, an optical and near-IR followup programme has been initiated to image high significance SPT clusters to measure their photometric redshifts. The speaker will present details and results of this ongoing optical follow-up campaign, and present some science highlights based on results of these observations. He shall also briefly talk about the Dark Energy Survey, which is a photometric survey in grizY bands covering about 5000 square degrees, which will start taking data by the end of the year.