Scientific verification of Faraday Rotation Modulators: Detection of diffuse polarized Galactic emission

Abstract

The design and performance of a wide bandwidth linear polarization modulator based on the Faraday effect is described. Faraday Rotation Modulators (FRMs) are solid-state polarization switches that are capable of modulation up to ~10 kHz. Six FRMs were utilized during the 2006 observing season in the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) experiment; three FRMs were used at each of BICEP's 100 and 150 GHz frequency bands. The technology was verified through high signal-to-noise detection of Galactic polarization using two of the six FRMs during four observing runs in 2006. The features exhibit strong agreement with BICEP's measurements of the Galaxy using non-FRM pixels and with the Galactic polarization models. This marks the first detection of high signal-to-noise mm-wave celestial polarization using fast, active optical modulation. The performance of the FRMs during periods when they were not modulated was also analyzed and compared to results from BICEP's 43 pixels without FRMs.

13 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• CLASS: The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor
• Modulation of CMB polarization with a warm rapidly-rotating half-wave plate on the Atacama B-Mode Search (ABS) instrument
• Self-Calibration of BICEP1 Three-Year Data and Constraints on Astrophysical Polarization Rotation
• Degree-Scale CMB Polarization Measurements from Three Years of BICEP1 Data
• Systematic effects from an ambient-temperature, continuously-rotating half-wave plate
• Design and development of an ambient-temperature continuously-rotating achromatic half-wave plate for CMB polarization modulation on the POLARBEAR-2 experiment
• A cryogenic rotation stage with a large clear aperture for the half-wave plates in the Spider instrument
• Recovery of Large Angular Scale CMB Polarization for Instruments Employing Variable-delay Polarization Modulators
• Submillimeter Polarimetry with PolKa, a reflection-type modulator for the APEX telescope
• The Simons Observatory: Development and Optical Evaluation of Achromatic Half-Wave Plates
• Development of Calibration Strategies for the Simons Observatory
• Study on the filters of atmospheric contamination in ground based CMB observation