Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS): 90 GHz Telescope Pointing, Beam Profile, Window Function, and Polarization Performance
Abstract
The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a telescope array that observes the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over ~75% of the sky from the Atacama Desert, Chile, at frequency bands centered near 40, 90, 150, and 220 GHz. CLASS measures the large angular scale CMB polarization to constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the optical depth to last scattering. This paper presents the optical characterization of the 90GHz telescope, which has been observing since July 2018. Observations of the Moon establish the pointing while dedicated observations of Jupiter are used for beam calibration. The standard deviations of the pointing error in azimuth, elevation, and boresight angle are 1.3, 2.1, and 2.0 arcminutes, respectively, over the first 3 years of observations. This corresponds to a pointing uncertainty ~7% of the beam's full width at half maximum (FWHM). The effective azimuthally-symmetrized instrument 1D beam estimated at 90 GHz has an FWHM of 0.620+/-0.003 deg and a solid angle of 138.7+/-0.6(stats.)+/-1.1(sys.) usr integrated to a radius of 4 deg. The corresponding beam window function drops to b_ell^2 = 0.93, 0.71, 0.14 at ell = 30, 100, 300, respectively. Far-sidelobes are studied using detector-centered intensity maps of the Moon and measured to be at a level of 10^-3 or below relative to the peak. The polarization angle of Tau A estimated from preliminary survey maps is 149.6+/-0.2(stats.) deg in equatorial coordinates. The instrumental temperature-to-polarization (T-to-P) leakage fraction, inferred from per-detector demodulated Jupiter scan data, has a monopole component at the level of 1.7 x 10^-3, a dipole component with an amplitude of 4.3 x 10^-3, with no evidence of quadrupolar leakage.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2308.13309,
title = {Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS): 90 GHz Telescope Pointing, Beam Profile, Window Function, and Polarization Performance},
author = {Rahul Datta and Michael K. Brewer and Jullianna Denes Couto and Joseph Eimer and Yunyang Li and Zhilei Xu and Aamir Ali and John W. Appel and Charles L. Bennett and Ricardo Bustos and David T. Chuss and Joseph Cleary and Sumit Dahal and Francisco Espinoza and Thomas Essinger-Hileman and Pedro Fluxá and Kathleen Harrington and Kyle Helson and Jeffrey Iuliano and John Karakla and Tobias A. Marriage and Sasha Novack and Carolina Núñez and Ivan L. Padilla and Lucas Parker and Matthew A. Petroff and Rodrigo Reeves and Karwan Rostem and Rui Shi and Deniz A. N. Valle and Duncan J. Watts and Janet L. Weiland and Edward J. Wollack and Lingzhen Zeng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.13309},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
24 pages, 18 figures, submitted to ApJS