The Simons Observatory (SO) will make precision temperature and polarization measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using a series of telescopes which will cover angular scales between one arcminute and tens of degrees and sample frequencies between 27 and 270 GHz. Here we present the current design of the large aperture telescope receiver (LATR), a 2.4 m diameter cryostat that will be mounted on the SO 6 m telescope and will be the largest CMB receiver to date. The cryostat size was chosen to take advantage of the large focal plane area having high Strehl ratios, which is inherent to the Cross-Dragone telescope design. The LATR will be able to accommodate thirteen optics tubes, each having a 36 cm diameter aperture and illuminating several thousand transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers. This set of equipment will provide an opportunity to make measurements with unparalleled sensitivity. However, the size and complexity of the LATR also pose numerous technical challenges. In the following paper, we present the design of the LATR and include how we address these challenges. The solutions we develop in the process of designing the LATR will be informative for the general CMB community, and for future CMB experiments like CMB-S4.
@article{arxiv.1808.10037,
title = {Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope Receiver Design Overview},
author = {Ningfeng Zhu and John L. Orlowski-Scherer and Zhilei Xu and Aamir Ali and Kam S. Arnold and Peter C. Ashton and Gabriele Coppi and Mark J. Devlin and Simon Dicker and Nicholas Galitzki and Patricio A. Gallardo and Shawn W. Henderson and Shuay-Pwu Patty Ho and Johannes Hubmayr and Brian Keating and Adrian T. Lee and Michele Limon and Marius Lungu and Philip D. Mauskopf and Andrew J. May and Jeff McMahon and Michael D. Niemack and Lucio Piccirillo and Giuseppe Puglisi and Mayuri Sathyanarayana Rao and Maria Salatino and Max Silva-Feaver and Sara M. Simon and Suzanne Staggs and Robert Thornton and Joel N. Ullom and Eve M. Vavagiakis and Benjamin Westbrook and Edward J. Wollack},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.10037},
year = {2018}
}