English

GroundBIRD: First On-Sky Responsivity Calibration at the Teide Observatory

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2026-07-12 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

GroundBIRD is a cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment located at the Teide Observatory (altitude 2400\sim2400 m, Spain) designed to measure large-angular-scale intensity and polarization anisotropies (6\ell \gtrsim 6 to 300\ell \sim 300) to constrain the reionization optical depth, τ\tau. The instrument employs a rapidly rotating telescope with a fixed elevation of 7070 deg and is equipped with 161 lenslet-coupled kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs): 138 at 145 GHz for CMB observations and 23 at 220 GHz for thermal dust characterization, all operated at 280\sim280 mK. This scan strategy provides daily coverage of \sim40% of the Northern Hemisphere sky. We present the first on-sky responsivity calibration model for GroundBIRD, derived from repeated observations of Jupiter using the twelve most stable KIDs from GroundBIRD array 6 (GB06). The analysis establishes and validates a calibration methodology for this detector subset while providing the first empirical characterization of detector responsivity as a function of precipitable water vapor (PWV). We find that the responsivity decreases by approximately 30% across the sampled PWV range and is well described by a linear PWV-dependent model. Comparison with Moon observations reveals distinct detector operating regimes associated with different optical loading conditions. The Jupiter-based calibration achieves better than 20% precision under typical observing conditions and better than 20% relative stability over a one-month timescale. These results establish the basis for extending the calibration methodology to the full GroundBIRD focal plane.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.10845,
  title  = {GroundBIRD: First On-Sky Responsivity Calibration at the Teide Observatory},
  author = {Alessandro Fasano and Yonggil Jo and Ricardo Tanausú Génova-Santos and Makoto Hattori and Shunsuke Honda and Kenichi Karatsu and Chiko Otani and Michael Peel and José Alberto Rubiño-Martín and Yoshinori Sueno and Junya Suzuki and Osamu Tajima and Tomonaga Tanaka and Miku Tsujii and Eunil Won},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.10845},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

To appear in Proceedings of SPIE, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2026. 13 pages, 6 figures, 1 table