The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)
Abstract
The Primordial Inflation Polarization ExploreR (PIPER) is a balloon-borne telescope designed to measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background on large angular scales. PIPER will map 85% of the sky at 200, 270, 350, and 600 GHz over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from the northern and southern hemispheres. The first science flight will use two 32x40 arrays of backshort-under-grid transition edge sensors, multiplexed in the time domain, and maintained at 100 mK by a Continuous Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator. Front-end cryogenic Variable-delay Polarization Modulators provide systematic control by rotating linear to circular polarization at 3 Hz. Twin telescopes allow PIPER to measure Stokes I, Q, U, and V simultaneously. The telescope is maintained at 1.5 K in an LHe bucket dewar. Cold optics and the lack of a warm window permit sensitivity at the sky-background limit. The ultimate science target is a limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio of r ~ 0.007, from the reionization bump to l ~ 300. PIPER's first flight will be from the Northern hemisphere, and overlap with the CLASS survey at lower frequencies. We describe the current status of the PIPER instrument.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.06172,
title = {The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)},
author = {Natalie N. Gandilo and Peter A. R. Ade and Dominic Benford and Charles L. Bennett and David T. Chuss and Jessie L. Dotson and Joseph R. Eimer and Dale J. Fixsen and Mark Halpern and Gene Hilton and Gary F. Hinshaw and Kent Irwin and Christine Jhabvala and Mark Kimball and Alan Kogut and Luke Lowe and Jeff J. McMahon and Timothy M. Miller and Paul Mirel and S. Harvey Moseley and Samuel Pawlyk and Samelys Rodriguez and Elmer Sharp and Peter Shirron and Johannes G. Staguhn and Dan F. Sullivan and Eric R. Switzer and Peter Taraschi and Carole E. Tucker and Edward J. Wollack},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.06172},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
8 pages, 6 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9914. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2016, conference 9914