The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is an experiment to measure the signature of a gravita-tional-wave background from inflation in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). CLASS is a multi-frequency array of four telescopes operating from a high-altitude site in the Atacama Desert in Chile. CLASS will survey 70\% of the sky in four frequency bands centered at 38, 93, 148, and 217 GHz, which are chosen to straddle the Galactic-foreground minimum while avoiding strong atmospheric emission lines. This broad frequency coverage ensures that CLASS can distinguish Galactic emission from the CMB. The sky fraction of the CLASS survey will allow the full shape of the primordial B-mode power spectrum to be characterized, including the signal from reionization at low ℓ. Its unique combination of large sky coverage, control of systematic errors, and high sensitivity will allow CLASS to measure or place upper limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio at a level of r=0.01 and make a cosmic-variance-limited measurement of the optical depth to the surface of last scattering, τ.
@article{arxiv.1408.4788,
title = {CLASS: The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor},
author = {Thomas Essinger-Hileman and Aamir Ali and Mandana Amiri and John W. Appel and Derek Araujo and Charles L. Bennett and Fletcher Boone and Manwei Chan and Hsiao-Mei Cho and David T. Chuss and Felipe Colazo and Erik Crowe and Kevin Denis and Rolando Dünner and Joseph Eimer and Dominik Gothe and Mark Halpern and Kathleen Harrington and Gene Hilton and Gary F. Hinshaw and Caroline Huang and Kent Irwin and Glenn Jones and John Karakla and Alan J. Kogut and David Larson and Michele Limon and Lindsay Lowry and Tobias Marriage and Nicholas Mehrle and Amber D. Miller and Nathan Miller and Samuel H. Moseley and Giles Novak and Carl Reintsema and Karwan Rostem and Thomas Stevenson and Deborah Towner and Kongpop U-Yen and Emily Wagner and Duncan Watts and Edward Wollack and Zhilei Xu and Lingzhen Zeng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.4788},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
23 pages, 10 figures, Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy VII. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153