MAXIMA: A Balloon-Borne Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Experiment

Abstract

We describe the Millimeter wave Anisotropy eXperiment IMaging Array (MAXIMA), a balloon-borne experiment designed to measure the temperature anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) on angular scales of 10' to 5 degrees . MAXIMA mapped the CMB using 16 bolometric detectors in spectral bands centered at 150 GHz, 240 GHz, and 410 GHz, with 10' resolution at all frequencies. The combined receiver sensitivity to CMB anisotropy was ~40 microK/rt(sec). Systematic parasitic contributions were minimized by using four uncorrelated spatial modulations, thorough crosslinking, multiple independent CMB observations, heavily baffled optics, and strong spectral discrimination. Pointing reconstruction was accurate to 1', and absolute calibration was better than 4%. Two MAXIMA flights with more than 8.5 hours of CMB observations have mapped a total of 300 deg^2 of the sky in regions of negligible known foreground emission. MAXIMA results have been released in previous publications. MAXIMA maps, power spectra and correlation matrices are publicly available at http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/maxima

22 pages, 22 figures, 13 tables. Submitted to ApJ. More information and figures are available for download at http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/maxima/

References in corpus (27)

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• Cosmology from Maxima-1, Boomerang and COBE/DMR CMB Observations
• A High Spatial Resolution Analysis of the MAXIMA-1 Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Data
• Cosmological implications of the MAXIMA-I high resolution Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy measurement
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• Foregrounds and CMB Experiments: I. Semi-analytical estimates of contamination
• Estimates of Cosmological Parameters Using the CMB Angular Power Spectrum of ACBAR
• The Relative Performance of Filled and Feedhorn-Coupled Focal-plane Architectures
• Tests for Gaussianity of the MAXIMA-1 CMB Map
• A Microcalorimeter and Bolometer Model
• Making Maps Of The Cosmic Microwave Background: The MAXIMA Example
• Estimate of the Cosmological Bispectrum from the MAXIMA-1 Cosmic Microwave Background Map
• First results from the Very Small Array -- IV. Cosmological parameter estimation
• The last stand before MAP: cosmological parameters from lensing, CMB and galaxy clustering
• Multiple Methods for Estimating the Bispectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background with Application to the MAXIMA Data
• Asymmetric Beams in Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Experiments
• Whole Disk Observations of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars in Millimeter--Submillimeter Bands
• Frequentist Estimation of Cosmological Parameters from the MAXIMA-1 Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Data
• The Effect of the Detector Response Time on Bolometric Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Experiments
• Contribution of Extragalactic Infrared Sources to CMB Foreground Anisotropy
• MAXIPOL: A Balloon-borne Experiment for Measuring the Polarization Anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
• Correlations Between the WMAP and MAXIMA Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Maps
• Determining Foreground Contamination in CMB Observations: Diffuse Galactic Emission in the MAXIMA-I Field
• Goodness-of-Fit Tests to study the Gaussianity of the MAXIMA data

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• CMB Telescopes and Optical Systems
• Polarization Calibration of a Microwave Polarimeter with Near-Infrared Up-Conversion for Optical Correlation and Detection
• CMB lensing forecasts for constraining the primordial perturbations: adding to the CMB temperature and polarization information
• Optimisation of the Population Monte Carlo algorithm: Application to constraining isocurvature models with cosmic microwave background data