2013/11/12 by T. Matsumura, Y. Akiba, J. Borrill +66 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.IM #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10909-013-0996-1
published as Journal of Low Temperature Physics September 2014, Volume 176, Issue 5-6, pp 733-740 · 6 pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2013/11/12 · arxiv updated 2014/07/24
LiteBIRD is a next-generation satellite mission to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. On large angular scales the B-mode polarization of the CMB carries the imprint of primordial gravitational waves, and its precise measurement would provide a powerful probe of the epoch of inflation. The goal of LiteBIRD is to achieve a measurement of the characterizing tensor to scalar ratio r to an uncertainty of δr=0.001. In order to achieve this goal we will employ a kilo-pixel superconducting detector array on a cryogenically cooled sub-Kelvin focal plane with an optical system at a temperature of 4~K. We are currently considering two detector array options; transition edge sensor (TES) bolometers and microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKID). In this paper we give an overview of LiteBIRD and describe a TES-based polarimeter designed to achieve the target sensitivity of 2~μK⋅arcmin over the frequency range 50 to 320~GHz.