BFORE: The B-mode Foreground Experiment
Abstract
The B-mode Foreground Experiment (BFORE) is a proposed NASA balloon project designed to make optimal use of the sub-orbital platform by concentrating on three dust foreground bands (270, 350, and 600 GHz) that complement ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) programs. BFORE will survey ~1/4 of the sky with 1.7 - 3.7 arcminute resolution, enabling precise characterization of the Galactic dust that now limits constraints on inflation from CMB B-mode polarization measurements. In addition, BFORE's combination of frequency coverage, large survey area, and angular resolution enables science far beyond the critical goal of measuring foregrounds. BFORE will constrain the velocities of thousands of galaxy clusters, provide a new window on the cosmic infrared background, and probe magnetic fields in the interstellar medium. We review the BFORE science case, timeline, and instrument design, which is based on a compact off-axis telescope coupled to >10,000 superconducting detectors.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1509.05392,
title = {BFORE: The B-mode Foreground Experiment},
author = {Michael D. Niemack and Peter Ade and Francesco de Bernardis and Francois Boulanger and Sean Bryan and Mark Devlin and Joanna Dunkley and Steve Eales and Haley Gomez and Chris Groppi and Shawn Henderson and Seth Hillbrand and Johannes Hubmayr and Philip Mauskopf and Jeff McMahon and Marc-Antoine Miville-Deschênes and Enzo Pascale and Giampaolo Pisano and Giles Novak and Douglas Scott and Juan Soler and Carole Tucker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.05392},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures, conference proceedings published in Journal of Low Temperature Physics