The 10-meter South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a millimeter wavelength
telescope designed to conduct sensitive measurements of the cosmic
microwave background (CMB) at arc-minute resolution. Currently the SPT is
conducting a 2500 square degree survey to find clusters of galaxies from
their distortion of the CMB, known as the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect.
The surface brightness of the SZ effect is redshift independent which
allows a SZ survey to provide a nearly mass limited cluster sample out to
the earliest epochs of cluster formation. Currently, the SPT has surveyed
over 1500 square degrees to full survey depth, and has identified hundreds
of cluster candidates. Of these, over 300 have been optically confirmed,
with the majority being newly discovered clusters at z > 0.5. We will
summarize the first results from the SPT cluster survey, including
cosmological constraints from their measurement of the growth of
structure.
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