The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)

Abstract

The Primordial Inflation Polarization ExploreR (PIPER) is a balloon-borne telescope designed to measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background on large angular scales. PIPER will map 85% of the sky at 200, 270, 350, and 600 GHz over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from the northern and southern hemispheres. The first science flight will use two 32x40 arrays of backshort-under-grid transition edge sensors, multiplexed in the time domain, and maintained at 100 mK by a Continuous Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator. Front-end cryogenic Variable-delay Polarization Modulators provide systematic control by rotating linear to circular polarization at 3 Hz. Twin telescopes allow PIPER to measure Stokes I, Q, U, and V simultaneously. The telescope is maintained at 1.5 K in an LHe bucket dewar. Cold optics and the lack of a warm window permit sensitivity at the sky-background limit. The ultimate science target is a limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio of r ~ 0.007, from the reionization bump to l ~ 300. PIPER's first flight will be from the Northern hemisphere, and overlap with the CLASS survey at lower frequencies. We describe the current status of the PIPER instrument.

arXiv comment8 pages, 6 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9914. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2016, conference 9914

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• A Projected Estimate of the Reionization Optical Depth Using the CLASS Experiment's Sample-Variance Limited E-Mode Measurement
• The Experiment for Cryogenic Large-aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM)
• Two-year Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) Observations: 40 GHz Telescope Pointing, Beam Profile, Window Function, and Polarization Performance
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• Precision Predictions for the Primordial Power Spectra of Scalar Potential Models of Inflation
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• Probing the Early History of Cosmic Reionization by Future Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments
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• Resolving primordial physics through correlated signatures
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• Superfluid Liquid Helium Control for the Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer Balloon Payload
• Improving the Single Scalar Consistency Relation
• Measuring Reionization, Neutrino Mass, and Cosmic Inflation with BFORE
• Multi-field inflation and the field-space metric
• ABS: an Analytical method of Blind Separation of CMB from foregrounds
• CMB lensing from early-formed dark matter halos
• Cosmic Microwave Background Science at Commercial Airline Altitudes
• Quantum measurement systems and applications to particle physics and cosmology