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Spider is a balloon-borne instrument designed to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with degree-scale resolution over a large fraction of the sky. Spiders main goal is to measure the amplitude of primordial gravitational waves through their imprint on the polarization of the CMB if the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, is greater than 0.03. To achieve this goal, instrumental systematic errors must be controlled with unprecedented accuracy. Here, we build on previous work to use simulations of Spider observations to examine the impact of several systematic effects that have been characterized through testing and modeling of various instrument components. In particular, we investigate the impact of the non-ideal spectral response of the half-wave plates, coupling between focal plane components and the Earths magnetic field, and beam mismatches and asymmetries. We also present a model of diffuse polarized foreground emission based on a three-dimensional model of the Galactic magnetic field and dust, and study the interaction of this foreground emission with our observation strategy and instrumental effects. We find that the expected level of foreground and systematic contamination is sufficiently low for Spider to achieve its science goals.
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We present the completion of a data analysis pipeline that self-consistently separates global 21-cm signals from large systematics using a pattern recognition technique. In the first paper of this series, we obtain optimal basis vectors from signal and foreground training sets to linearly fit both components with the minimal number of terms that best extracts the signal given its overlap with the foreground. In this second paper, we utilize the spectral constraints derived in the first paper to calculate the full posterior probability distribution of any signal parameter space of choice. The spectral fit provides the starting point for a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) engine that samples the signal without traversing the foreground parameter space. At each MCMC step, we marginalize over the weights of all linear foreground modes and suppress those with unimportant variations by applying priors gleaned from the training set. This method drastically reduces the number of MCMC parameters, augmenting the efficiency of exploration, circumvents the need for selecting a minimal number of foreground modes, and allows the complexity of the foreground model to be greatly increased to simultaneously describe many observed spectra without requiring extra MCMC parameters. Using two nonlinear signal models, one based on EDGES observations and the other on phenomenological frequencies and temperatures of theoretically expected extrema, we demonstrate the success of this methodology by recovering the input parameters from multiple randomly simulated signals at low radio frequencies (10-200 MHz), while rigorously accounting for realistically modeled beam-weighted foregrounds.
SPIDER is a balloon-borne instrument designed to map the polarization of the millimeter-wave sky at large angular scales. SPIDER targets the B-mode signature of primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), with a focus on mapping a large sky area with high fidelity at multiple frequencies. SPIDERs first longduration balloon (LDB) flight in January 2015 deployed a total of 2400 antenna-coupled Transition Edge Sensors (TESs) at 90 GHz and 150 GHz. In this work we review the design and in-flight performance of the SPIDER instrument, with a particular focus on the measured performance of the detectors and instrument in a space-like loading and radiation environment. SPIDERs second flight in December 2018 will incorporate payload upgrades and new receivers to map the sky at 285 GHz, providing valuable information for cleaning polarized dust emission from CMB maps.
We present a new upper limit on CMB circular polarization from the 2015 flight of SPIDER, a balloon-borne telescope designed to search for $B$-mode linear polarization from cosmic inflation. Although the level of circular polarization in the CMB is predicted to be very small, experimental limits provide a valuable test of the underlying models. By exploiting the non-zero circular-to-linear polarization coupling of the HWP polarization modulators, data from SPIDERs 2015 Antarctic flight provide a constraint on Stokes $V$ at 95 and 150 GHz from $33<ell<307$. No other limits exist over this full range of angular scales, and SPIDER improves upon the previous limit by several orders of magnitude, providing 95% C.L. constraints on $ell (ell+1)C_{ell}^{VV}/(2pi)$ ranging from 141 $mu K ^2$ to 255 $mu K ^2$ at 150 GHz for a thermal CMB spectrum. As linear CMB polarization experiments become increasingly sensitive, the techniques described in this paper can be applied to obtain even stronger constraints on circular polarization.
We describe SPIDER, a balloon-borne instrument to map the polarization of the millimeter-wave sky with degree angular resolution. Spider consists of six monochromatic refracting telescopes, each illuminating a focal plane of large-format antenna-coupled bolometer arrays. A total of 2,624 superconducting transition-edge sensors are distributed among three observing bands centered at 90, 150, and 280 GHz. A cold half-wave plate at the aperture of each telescope modulates the polarization of incoming light to control systematics. Spiders first flight will be a 20-30-day Antarctic balloon campaign in December 2011. This flight will map sim8% of the sky to achieve unprecedented sensitivity to the polarization signature of the gravitational wave background predicted by inflationary cosmology. The Spider mission will also serve as a proving ground for these detector technologies in preparation for a future satellite mission.
Precise polarisation measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) require accurate knowledge of the instrument orientation relative to the sky frame used to define the cosmological Stokes parameters. Suitable celestial calibration sources that could be used to measure the polarimeter orientation angle are limited, so current experiments commonly `self-calibrate. The self-calibration method exploits the theoretical fact that the $EB$ and $TB$ cross-spectra of the CMB vanish in the standard cosmological model, so any detected $EB$ and $TB$ signals must be due to systematic errors. However, this assumption neglects the fact that polarized Galactic foregrounds in a given portion of the sky may have non-zero $EB$ and $TB$ cross-spectra. If these foreground signals remain in the observations, then they will bias the self-calibrated telescope polarisation angle and produce a spurious $B$-mode signal. In this paper we estimate the foreground-induced bias for various instrument configurations and then expand the self-calibration formalism to account for polarized foreground signals. Assuming the $EB$ correlation signal for dust is in the range constrained by angular power spectrum measurements from Planck at 353 GHz (scaled down to 150 GHz), then the bias is negligible for high angular resolution experiments, which have access to CMB-dominated high $ell$ modes with which to self-calibrate. Low-resolution experiments observing particularly dusty sky patches can have a bias as large as $0.5^circ$. A miscalibration of this magnitude generates a spurious $BB$ signal corresponding to a tensor-to-scalar ratio of approximately $rsim2times10^{-3}$, within the targeted range of planned experiments.
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