Analysis of performance of three- and five-stack achromatic half-wave plates at millimeter wavelengths

Abstract

We study the performance of achromatic half-wave plates (AHWP) as a function of their construction parameters, the detection bandwidth of a power detector operating in the millimeter wave band, and the spectral shape of the incident radiation. We focus particular attention on the extraction of the degree of incident polarization and its orientation angle from the intensity measured as a function of AHWP rotation angle, which we call the IVA (intensity versus angle). We quantify the phase offset of the IVA and point to potential systematic errors in the extraction of this offset in cases where the incident spectrum is not sufficiently well known. We show how the phase offset and modulation efficiency of the AHWP depend on the relative angles between the plates in the stack and find that high modulation efficiency can be achieved with alignment accuracy of few degrees.

submitted to Applied Optics

References in corpus (7)

• Three Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Polarization Analysis
• MAXIPOL: Cosmic Microwave Background Polarimetry Using a Rotating Half-Wave Plate
• The EBEX Experiment
• MAXIPOL: Data Analysis and Results
• A Millimeter-Wave Achromatic Half Wave Plate
• PAPPA: Primordial Anisotropy Polarization Pathfinder Array
• CLOVER - A new instrument for measuring the B-mode polarization of the CMB

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• The Simons Observatory: gain, bandpass and polarization-angle calibration requirements for B-mode searches
• Empirical modelling of the BLASTPol achromatic half-wave plate for precision submillimetre polarimetry
• The EBEX Balloon Borne Experiment - Optics, Receiver, and Polarimetry
• Polypropylene Embedded Metal-Mesh Broadband Achromatic Half Wave Plate for Millimeter Wavelengths
• A cryogenic continuously rotating half-wave plate for the POLARBEAR-2b cosmic microwave background receiver
• Framework for analysis of next generation, polarised CMB data sets in the presence of galactic foregrounds and systematic effects
• Highly efficient broadband polarization retarders and tunable polarization filters made of composite stacks of ordinary wave plates
• Requirements for future CMB satellite missions: photometric and band-pass response calibration
• The Impact of the Spectral Response of an Achromatic Half-Wave Plate on the Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization
• Design of a frequency-independent optic axis Pancharatnam-based achromatic half-wave plate
• Variable Ultra-broadband and Narrowband Composite Polarization Retarders
• The Simons Observatory: Quantifying the impact of beam chromaticity on large-scale B-mode science