English

Designs for next generation CMB survey strategies from Chile

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2018-08-16 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

New telescopes are being built to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with unprecedented sensitivity, including Simons Observatory (SO), CCAT-prime, the BICEP Array, SPT-3G, and CMB Stage-4. We present observing strategies for telescopes located in Chile that are informed by the tools used to develop recent Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and Polarbear surveys. As with ACT and Polarbear, these strategies are composed of scans that sweep in azimuth at constant elevation. We explore observing strategies for both small (0.42 m) aperture telescopes (SAT) and a large (6 m) aperture telescope (LAT). We study strategies focused on small sky areas to search for inflationary gravitational waves as well as strategies spanning roughly half the low-foreground sky to constrain the effective number of relativistic species and measure the sum of neutrino masses via the gravitational lensing signal due to large scale structure. We present these strategies specifically considering the telescope hardware and science goals of the SO, located at 23 degrees South latitude, 67.8 degrees West longitude. Observations close to the Sun and the Moon can introduce additional systematics by applying additional power to the instrument through telescope sidelobes. Significant side lobe contamination in the data can occur even at tens of degrees or more from bright sources. Therefore, we present several strategies that implement Sun and Moon avoidance constraints into the telescope scheduling. Strategies for resolving conflicts between simultaneously visible fields are discussed. We focus on maximizing telescope time spent on science observations. It will also be necessary to schedule calibration measurements, however that is beyond the scope of this work. The outputs of this study are algorithms that can generate specific schedule commands for the Simons Observatory instruments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.05131,
  title  = {Designs for next generation CMB survey strategies from Chile},
  author = {Jason R. Stevens and Neil Goeckner-Wald and Reijo Keskitalo and Nialh McCallum and Aamir Ali and Julian Borrill and Michael L. Brown and Yuji Chinone and Patricio A. Gallardo and Akito Kusaka and Adrian T. Lee and Jeff McMahon and Michael D. Niemack and Lyman Page and Giuseppe Puglisi and Maria Salatino and Suet Ying D. Mak and Grant Teply and Daniel B. Thomas and Eve M. Vavagiakis and Edward J. Wollack and Zhilei Xu and Ningfeng Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.05131},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

15 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018