Initial Performance of BICEP3: A Degree Angular Scale 95 GHz Band Polarimeter

Abstract

BICEP3 is a $550mm$ aperture telescope with cold, on-axis, refractive optics designed to observe at the $95GHz$ band from the South Pole. It is the newest member of the BICEP/Keck family of inflationary probes specifically designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree-angular scales. BICEP3 is designed to house 1280 dual-polarization pixels, which, when fully-populated, totals to $\sim$9$\times$ the number of pixels in a single Keck $95GHz$ receiver, thus further advancing the BICEP/Keck program's $95GHz$ mapping speed. BICEP3 was deployed during the austral summer of 2014-2015 with 9 detector tiles, to be increased to its full capacity of 20 in the second season. After instrument characterization measurements were taken, CMB observation commenced in April 2015. Together with multi-frequency observation data from Planck, BICEP2, and the Keck Array, BICEP3 is projected to set upper limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio to $r$ $\lesssim 0.03$ at $95\%$ C.L..

arXiv comment7 pages, LTD-16 proceedings

Cited by in corpus (32)

• BICEP Array: a multi-frequency degree-scale CMB polarimeter
• Resurrecting Quadratic Inflation with a non-minimal coupling to gravity
• Hidden Inflaton Dark Matter
• Gaia Data Release 2 Catalogue of Extremely-low Mass White Dwarf Candidates
• Tracing the high energy theory of gravity: an introduction to Palatini inflation
• Distance, de Sitter and Trans-Planckian Censorship conjectures: the status quo of Warm Inflation
• Spectator Dark Matter
• Trans-Planckian Censorship, Inflation and Dark Matter
• Assessments of Ali, Dome A, and Summit Camp for Mm-wave Observations Using MERRA-2 Reanalysis
• Towards distinguishing variants of non-minimal inflation
• Natural inflation with a nonminimal coupling to gravity
• The POLARBEAR-2 and Simons Array Focal Plane Fabrication Status
• A novel way to determine the scale of inflation
• A Projected Estimate of the Reionization Optical Depth Using the CLASS Experiment's Sample-Variance Limited E-Mode Measurement
• Quadratic, Higgs and hilltop potentials in the Palatini gravity
• Slow-roll inflation in generalized scalar-torsion gravity
• Multi-Clustering Needlet-ILC for CMB B-modes component separation
• Cosmologically allowed regions for the axion decay constant $F_a$
• Gravitational Waves, mu Term & Leptogenesis from B-L Higgs Inflation in Supergravity
• Standard model Higgs field and hidden sector cosmology
• Pole-Induced Higgs Inflation With Hyperbolic Kaehler Geometries
• Lensing covariance on cut sky and SPT-Planck lensing tensions
• Violation of slow-roll in non-minimal inflation
• Analysis of NILC performance on B-modes data of sub-orbital experiments
• Reheating constraints on mutated hilltop inflation
• Unitarity-Safe Models of Non-Minimal Inflation in Supergravity
• Non-minimally Coupled Pseudoscalar Inflaton
• Lens covariance effects on likelihood analyses of CMB power spectra
• Optical Characterization of the BICEP3 CMB Polarimeter at the South Pole
• Optimal strategy for polarization modulation in the LSPE-SWIPE experiment
• Small field models of inflation that predict a tensor-to-scalar ratio $r=0.03$
• Unitarizing non-Minimal Inflation via a Linear Contribution to the Frame Function