The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)

Abstract

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a balloon-borne cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimeter designed to search for evidence of inflation by measuring the large-angular scale CMB polarization signal. BICEP2 recently reported a detection of B-mode power corresponding to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.2 on ~2 degree scales. If the BICEP2 signal is caused by inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), then there should be a corresponding increase in B-mode power on angular scales larger than 18 degrees. PIPER is currently the only suborbital instrument capable of fully testing and extending the BICEP2 results by measuring the B-mode power spectrum on angular scales $\theta$ = ~0.6 deg to 90 deg, covering both the reionization bump and recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to r = 0.007, and four frequency bands to distinguish foregrounds. PIPER will accomplish this by mapping 85% of the sky in four frequency bands (200, 270, 350, 600 GHz) over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from the northern and southern hemispheres. The instrument has background-limited sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.5 K) optics focusing the sky signal onto four 32x40-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers held at 140 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematic control are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs), which rapidly modulate only the polarized sky signal at 3 Hz and allow PIPER to instantaneously measure the full Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) for each pointing. We describe the PIPER instrument and progress towards its first flight.

arXiv comment11 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014, conference 9153

References in corpus (9)

• BICEP2 I: Detection Of B-mode Polarization at Degree Angular Scales
• Statistics of Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization
• A CMB Polarization Primer
• Toward an Understanding of Foreground Emission in the BICEP2 Region
• A joint analysis of Planck and BICEP2 B modes including dust polarization uncertainty
• Modulation of CMB polarization with a warm rapidly-rotating half-wave plate on the Atacama B-Mode Search (ABS) instrument
• Large-aperture wide-bandwidth antireflection-coated silicon lenses for millimeter wavelengths
• An improved upper limit to the CMB circular polarization at large angular scales
• Variable-delay Polarization Modulators for Cryogenic Millimeter-wave Applications

Cited by in corpus (24)

• Robust forecasts on fundamental physics from the foreground-obscured, gravitationally-lensed CMB polarization
• FAST-PT II: an algorithm to calculate convolution integrals of general tensor quantities in cosmological perturbation theory
• The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor
• Search for Compensated Isocurvature Perturbations with Planck Power Spectra
• Circular polarization of the CMB: Foregrounds and detection prospects
• Circular polarization of the cosmic microwave background from vector and tensor perturbations
• Recovery of Large Angular Scale CMB Polarization for Instruments Employing Variable-delay Polarization Modulators
• Measuring the Largest Angular Scale CMB B-mode Polarization with Galactic Foregrounds on a Cut Sky
• Thermal Kinetic Inductance Detectors for millimeter-wave detection
• Silicon-Based Antenna-Coupled Polarization-Sensitive Millimeter-Wave Bolometer Arrays for Cosmic Microwave Background Instruments
• Dante's Waterfall
• Baryon Physics and Tight Coupling Approximation in Boltzmann Codes
• Precision Predictions for the Primordial Power Spectra of Scalar Potential Models of Inflation
• Generation of Circular Polarization of CMB via Polarized Compton Scattering
• Constraints on the Optical Depth to Reionization from Balloon-Borne CMB Measurements
• Resolving primordial physics through correlated signatures
• Improving the Single Scalar Consistency Relation
• BFORE: The B-mode Foreground Experiment
• Multi-field inflation and the field-space metric
• The Upper Bound on the Tensor-to-Scalar Ratio Consistent with Quantum Gravity
• CMB delensing with deep learning
• High-Efficiency and Low-Noise Detectors for the Upgraded CLASS 90 GHz Focal Plane
• The Balloon-Borne Cryogenic Telescope Testbed Mission: Bulk Cryogen Transfer at 40 km Altitude
• Robust Likelihoods for Inflationary Gravitational Waves from Maps of Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization