PILOT: a balloon-borne experiment to measure the polarized FIR emission of dust grains in the interstellar medium

Abstract

Future cosmology space missions will concentrate on measuring the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background, which potentially carries invaluable information about the earliest phases of the evolution of our universe. Such ambitious projects will ultimately be limited by the sensitivity of the instrument and by the accuracy at which polarized foreground emission from our own Galaxy can be subtracted out. We present the PILOT balloon project which will aim at characterizing one of these foreground sources, the polarization of the dust continuum emission in the diffuse interstellar medium. The PILOT experiment will also constitute a test-bed for using multiplexed bolometer arrays for polarization measurements. We present the results of ground tests obtained just before the first flight of the instrument.

arXiv comment17 pages, 13 figures. Presented at SPIE, Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy VII. To be published in Proc. SPIE volume 9153

References in corpus (4)

• Dispersion of Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds. I
• Far-infrared to millimeter astrophysical dust emission I: A model based on physical properties of amorphous solids
• First Detection of Polarization of the Submillimetre Diffuse Galactic Dust Emission by Archeops
• Elliptical Beams in CMB Temperature and Polarization Anisotropy Experiments: An Analytic Approach

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Sensitivity and foreground modelling for large-scale CMB B-mode polarization satellite missions
• Dust polarization and ISM turbulence
• Impact of half-wave plate systematics on the measurement of cosmic birefringence from CMB polarization
• Impact of half-wave plate systematics on the measurement of CMB $B$-mode polarization
• Geometrical and physical optics analysis for mm-wavelength refractor telescopes designed to map the cosmic microwave background