Abstract
We present an overview of the design and development of the POLARBEAR-2 experiment. The POLARBEAR-2 experiment is a cosmic microwave background polarimetry experiment, which aims to characterize the small angular scale B-mode signal due to gravitational lensing and search for the large angular scale B-mode signal from inflationary gravitational waves. The experiment will have a 365 mm diameter multi-chroic focal plane filled with 7,588 polarization sensitive antenna-coupled Transition Edge Sensor bolometers and will observe at 95 and 150 GHz. The focal plane is cooled to 250 mK. The bolometers will be read-out by SQUIDs with \(32\times \) frequency domain multiplexing. The experiment will utilize high purity alumina lenses and thermal filters to achieve the required high optical throughput. A continuously rotating, cooled half-wave plate will be used to give stringent control over systematic errors. The experiment is designed to achieve a noise equivalent temperature of 5.7 \(\mu \)K\(\sqrt{s}\), and this allows us to constrain the signal from the inflationary primordial gravitational corresponding to a tensor-to-scalar ratio of \(r = 0.01\) (\(2\sigma \)). POLARBEAR-2 will also be able to put a constraint on the sum of neutrino masses to 90 meV (\(1\sigma \)) with POLARBEAR-2 data alone and 65 meV (\(1\sigma \)) when combined with the Planck satellite. We plan to start observations in 2014 in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge support from the MEXT Kahenhi grant 21111002, NSF grant AST-0618398, NASA grant NNG06GJ08G, The Simons Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the CONICYT. Detectors were fabricated at Berkeley nanofabrication laboratory.
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Suzuki, A., Ade, P., Akiba, Y. et al. The POLARBEAR-2 Experiment. J Low Temp Phys 176, 719–725 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10909-014-1112-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10909-014-1112-x