BICEP3 is a 550mm aperture telescope with cold, on-axis, refractive optics designed to observe at the 95GHz band from the South Pole. It is the newest member of the BICEP/Keck family of inflationary probes specifically designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree-angular scales. BICEP3 is designed to house 1280 dual-polarization pixels, which, when fully-populated, totals to ∼9× the number of pixels in a single Keck 95GHz receiver, thus further advancing the BICEP/Keck program's 95GHz mapping speed. BICEP3 was deployed during the austral summer of 2014-2015 with 9 detector tiles, to be increased to its full capacity of 20 in the second season. After instrument characterization measurements were taken, CMB observation commenced in April 2015. Together with multi-frequency observation data from Planck, BICEP2, and the Keck Array, BICEP3 is projected to set upper limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio to r≲0.03 at 95% C.L..
@article{arxiv.1601.00125,
title = {Initial Performance of BICEP3: A Degree Angular Scale 95 GHz Band Polarimeter},
author = {W. L. K. Wu and P. A. R. Ade and Z. Ahmed and K. D. Alexander and M. Amiri and D. Barkats and S. J. Benton and C. A. Bischoff and J. J. Bock and R. Bowens-Rubin and I. Buder and E. Bullock and V. Buza and J. A. Connors and J. P. Filippini and S. Fliescher and J. A. Grayson and M. Halpern and S. A. Harrison and G. C. Hilton and V. V. Hristov and H. Hui and K. D. Irwin and J. Kang and K. S. Karkare and E. Karpel and S. Kefeli and S. A. Kernasovskiy and J. M. Kovac and C. L. Kuo and K. G. Megerian and C. B. Netterfield and H. T. Nguyen and R. O'Brient and R. W. Ogburn and C. Pryke and C. D. Reintsema and S. Richter and C. Sorensen and Z. K. Staniszewski and B. Steinbach and R. V. Sudiwala and G. P. Teply and K. L. Thompson and J. E. Tolan and C. E. Tucker and A. D. Turner and A. G. Vieregg and A. C. Weber and D. V. Wiebe and J. Willmert and K. W. Yoon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.00125},
year = {2016}
}