The Polarbear-2 and the Simons Array Experiments
Abstract
We present an overview of the design and status of the Polarbear-2 and the Simons Array experiments. Polarbear-2 is a cosmic microwave background polarimetry experiment which aims to characterize the arc-minute angular scale B-mode signal from weak gravitational lensing and search for the degree angular scale B-mode signal from inflationary gravitational waves. The receiver has a 365 mm diameter focal plane cooled to 270 mK. The focal plane is filled with 7588 dichroic lenslet-antenna-coupled polarization sensitive transition edge sensor (TES) bolometric pixels that are sensitive to 95 and 150 GHz bands simultaneously. The TES bolometers are read-out by SQUIDs with 40 channel frequency domain multiplexing. Refractive optical elements are made with high-purity alumina to achieve high optical throughput. The receiver is designed to achieve noise equivalent temperature of 5.8 \upmu K_CMB√{s} in each frequency band. Polarbear-2 will deploy in 2016 in the Atacama desert in Chile. The Simons Array is a project to further increase sensitivity by deploying three Polarbear-2 type receivers. The Simons Array will cover 95, 150, and 220 GHz frequency bands for foreground control. The Simons Array will be able to constrain tensor-to-scalar ratio and sum of neutrino masses to σ (r) = 6× 10^{-3} at r = 0.1 and sum m_{\upnu } (σ =1) to 40 meV.
- Publication:
-
Journal of Low Temperature Physics
- Pub Date:
- August 2016
- DOI:
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1512.07299
- Bibcode:
- 2016JLTP..184..805S
- Keywords:
-
- Cosmic microwave background;
- Inflation;
- Gravitational weak lensing;
- Polarization;
- B-mode;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- Accepted to Journal of Low Temperature Physics LTD16 Special Issue, Low Temperature Detector 16 Conference Proceedings, 5 pages, 1 figure