The Simons Observatory (SO) is an upcoming cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment located on Cerro Toco, Chile, that will map the microwave sky in temperature and polarization in six frequency bands spanning 27 to 285 GHz. SO will consist of one 6-meter Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) fielding ∼30,000 detectors and an array of three 0.42-meter Small Aperture Telescopes (SATs) fielding an additional 30,000 detectors. This synergy will allow for the extremely sensitive characterization of the CMB over angular scales ranging from an arcmin to tens of degrees, enabling a wide range of scientific output. Here we focus on the SATs targeting degree angular scales with successive dichroic instruments observing at Mid-Frequency (MF: 93/145 GHz), Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF: 225/285 GHz), and Low-Frequency (LF: 27/39 GHz). The three SATs will be able to map ∼10% of the sky to a noise level of 2 μK-arcmin when combining 93 and 145 GHz. The multiple frequency bands will allow the CMB to be separated from galactic foregrounds (primarily synchrotron and dust), with the primary science goal of characterizing the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r)≈0.003.
@article{arxiv.2001.07848,
title = {Small Aperture Telescopes for the Simons Observatory},
author = {Aamir M. Ali and Shunsuke Adachi and Kam Arnold and Peter Ashton and Andrew Bazarko and Yuji Chinone and Gabriele Coppi and Lance Corbett and Kevin D Crowley and Kevin T Crowley and Mark Devlin and Simon Dicker and Shannon Duff and Chris Ellis and Nicholas Galitzki and Neil Goeckner-Wald and Kathleen Harrington and Erin Healy and Charles A Hill and Shuay-Pwu Patty Ho and Johannes Hubmayr and Brian Keating and Kenji Kiuchi and Akito Kusaka and Adrian T Lee and Michael Ludlam and Aashrita Mangu and Frederick Matsuda and Heather McCarrick and Federico Nati and Michael D. Niemack and Haruki Nishino and John Orlowski-Scherer and Mayuri Sathyanarayana Rao and Christopher Raum and Yuki Sakurai and Maria Salatino and Trevor Sasse and Joseph Seibert and Carlos Sierra and Maximiliano Silva-Feaver and Jacob Spisak and Sara M Simon and Suzanne Staggs and Osamu Tajima and Grant Teply and Tran Tsan and Edward Wollack and Bejamin Westbrook and Zhilei Xu and Mario Zannoni and Ningfeng Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.07848},
year = {2020}
}