The Cosmic Foreground Explorer (COFE): A balloon-borne microwave polarimeter to characterize polarized foregrounds

Abstract

The COsmic Foreground Explorer (COFE) is a balloon-borne microwave polarime- ter designed to measure the low-frequency and low-l characteristics of dominant diffuse polarized foregrounds. Short duration balloon flights from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres will allow the telescope to cover up to 80% of the sky with an expected sensitivity per pixel better than 100 $\mu K/de{g}^2$ from 10 GHz to 20 GHz. This is an important effort toward characterizing the polarized foregrounds for future CMB experiments, in particular the ones that aim to detect primordial gravity wave signatures in the CMB polarization angular power spectrum.

15 pages Version 2 - missing pictures now appear at the end of the text

References in corpus (4)

• HEALPix -- a Framework for High Resolution Discretization, and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere
• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Foreground Emission
• Microwave ISM Emission in the Green Bank Galactic Plane Survey: Evidence for Spinning Dust
• Galactic foreground contribution to the BEAST CMB Anisotropy Maps

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Testing Bell's Inequality with Cosmic Photons: Closing the Setting-Independence Loophole
• Properties of a Variable-delay Polarization Modulator
• Real space tomography of the primordial Universe with cluster polarization
• Modeling the frequency response of microwave radiometers with QUCS