Studies of Systematic Uncertainties for Simons Observatory: Optical Effects and Sensitivity Considerations

Abstract

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new experiment that aims to measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in temperature and polarization. SO will measure the polarized sky over a large range of microwave frequencies and angular scales using a combination of small ($\sim 0.5\mathrm{m}$) and large ($\sim 6\mathrm{m}$) aperture telescopes and will be located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. This work is part of a series of papers studying calibration, sensitivity, and systematic errors for SO. In this paper, we discuss current efforts to model optical systematic effects, how these have been used to guide the design of the SO instrument, and how these studies can be used to inform instrument design of future experiments like CMB-S4. While optical systematics studies are underway for both the small aperture and large aperture telescopes, we limit the focus of this paper to the more mature large aperture telescope design for which our studies include: pointing errors, optical distortions, beam ellipticity, cross-polar response, instrumental polarization rotation and various forms of sidelobe pickup.

arXiv commentPoster presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2018

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope Receiver
• The optical design of the six-meter CCAT-prime and Simons Observatory telescopes
• Instrumental systematics biases in CMB lensing reconstruction: a simulation-based assessment
• Studies of Systematic Uncertainties for Simons Observatory: Detector Array Effects
• Freeform three-mirror anastigmatic large-aperture telescope and receiver optics for CMB-S4
• Simulating instrumental systematics of Cosmic Microwave Background experiments with s4cmb
• The Simons Observatory: impact of bandpass, polarization angle and calibration uncertainties on small-scale power spectrum analysis