Particle Physics Seminar

The QUasar Equatorial Survey Team (QUEST) project is an ongoing
synoptic sky survey which has been in progress since 1998. The recently
concluded Palomar/QUEST phase covered a 20,000 square degree area 70+
times, each to a depth of R ~ 20 in a red RG-610 filter. The data were
shared by several groups, including the NEAT/JPL search for asteroids and
minor planets, the Nearby Supernova Factory search for type Ia supernovae,
the QUEST quasar search, and most recently the DeepSky project at LBNL
which will co-add all Palomar/QUEST images to reach a depth of R > 23.
The wide-area QUEST camera is currently being relocated to ESO's La Silla
Observatory in Chile, where it will continue imaging the southern sky in
the SDSS g and r bands.
QUEST's repeated coverage of nearly half the sky accesses a new region
of parameter space in time-domain astronomy, anticipating the time
coverage available via the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and
provides a competitive platform for time-domain survey science until LSST
sees first light. I will briefly discuss the survey instrumentation and
data reduction, present an overview of ongoing QUEST science initiatives,
and then describe two of these in greater detail: (1) ensemble studies of
photometric variability in quasars, probing accretion onto supermassive
black holes, and (2) the discovery of several peculiar thermonuclear
supernovae, with implications for the progenitor systems of SNe Ia and
hence for systematic effects in the study of dark energy.