Abstract
We present an overview of the design and status of the Polarbear-2 and the Simons Array experiments. Polarbear-2 is a cosmic microwave background polarimetry experiment which aims to characterize the arc-minute angular scale B-mode signal from weak gravitational lensing and search for the degree angular scale B-mode signal from inflationary gravitational waves. The receiver has a 365 mm diameter focal plane cooled to 270 mK. The focal plane is filled with 7588 dichroic lenslet–antenna-coupled polarization sensitive transition edge sensor (TES) bolometric pixels that are sensitive to 95 and 150 GHz bands simultaneously. The TES bolometers are read-out by SQUIDs with 40 channel frequency domain multiplexing. Refractive optical elements are made with high-purity alumina to achieve high optical throughput. The receiver is designed to achieve noise equivalent temperature of 5.8 \(\upmu \)K\(_\mathrm{CMB}\sqrt{s}\) in each frequency band. Polarbear-2 will deploy in 2016 in the Atacama desert in Chile. The Simons Array is a project to further increase sensitivity by deploying three Polarbear-2 type receivers. The Simons Array will cover 95, 150, and 220 GHz frequency bands for foreground control. The Simons Array will be able to constrain tensor-to-scalar ratio and sum of neutrino masses to \(\sigma (r) = 6\times 10^{-3}\) at \(r = 0.1\) and \(\sum m_{\upnu } (\sigma =1)\) to 40 meV.
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the 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 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the CONICYT provided invaluable funding and support. Detectors were fabricated at the Berkeley Marvell Nanofabrication laboratory.
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Suzuki, A., Ade, P., Akiba, Y. et al. The Polarbear-2 and the Simons Array Experiments. J Low Temp Phys 184, 805–810 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10909-015-1425-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10909-015-1425-4