Scientific verification of Faraday Rotation Modulators: Detection of diffuse polarized Galactic emission
Abstract
The design and performance of a wide bandwidth linear polarization modulator based on the Faraday effect is described. Faraday Rotation Modulators (FRMs) are solid-state polarization switches that are capable of modulation up to ~10 kHz. Six FRMs were utilized during the 2006 observing season in the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) experiment; three FRMs were used at each of BICEP's 100 and 150 GHz frequency bands. The technology was verified through high signal-to-noise detection of Galactic polarization using two of the six FRMs during four observing runs in 2006. The features exhibit strong agreement with BICEP's measurements of the Galaxy using non-FRM pixels and with the Galactic polarization models. This marks the first detection of high signal-to-noise mm-wave celestial polarization using fast, active optical modulation. The performance of the FRMs during periods when they were not modulated was also analyzed and compared to results from BICEP's 43 pixels without FRMs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1212.0133,
title = {Scientific verification of Faraday Rotation Modulators: Detection of diffuse polarized Galactic emission},
author = {S. Moyerman and E. Bierman and P. A. R. Ade and R. Aiken and D. Barkats and C. Bischoff and J. J. Bock and H. C. Chiang and C. D. Dowell and L. Duband and E. F. Hivon and W. L. Holzapfel and V. V. Hristov and W. C. Jones and J. Kaufman and B. G. Keating and J. M. Kovac and C. L. Kuo and E. M. Leitch and P. V. Mason and T. Matsumura and H. T. Nguyen and N. Ponthieu and C. Pryke and S. Richter and G. Rocha and C. Sheehy and Y. D. Takahashi and J. E. Tolan and E. Wollack and K. W. Yoon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.0133},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
13 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables