Abstract:
POLARBEAR is a cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiment located in the Atacama desert in Chile. POLARBEAR-1 started observations in 2012, and in 2014, the POLARBEAR team published results from its first season of observations on a small fraction of the sky. These results include the first measurement of a non-zero B-mode polarization angular power spectrum, measured at sub-degree scales where the dominant signal is gravitational lensing of the CMB. We also published a measurement of the large-scale gravitational structure deflection power spectrum derived from CMB polarization alone, which demonstrates a powerful technique that can be used to measure nearly all of the gravitational structure in the universe. Improving these measurements requires precision characterization of the CMB polarization signal over large fractions of the sky, at multiple frequencies. To achieve these goals, POLARBEAR has begun expanding to include an additional two 3.5 meter telescopes with multi-chroic receivers, known as the Simons Array. Phased upgrades to receiver technology will improve sensitivity and capabilities, while continuing a deep survey of 80% of the sky. POLARBEAR-2 is the next receiver that will be installed in 2015 on a new telescope, with a larger area focal plane with dichroic pixels, with bands at 95 GHz and 150 GHz, and a total of 7,588 polarization sensitive antenna-coupled transition edge sensor bolometers. The focal plane is cooled to 250 milliKelvin, and the bolometers will be read-out by SQUID amplifiers with 40x frequency domain multiplexing. The array is designed to have a noise equivalent temperature of 5.7 μK√s.