The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is an experiment to measure the signature of a gravita-tional-wave background from inflation in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). CLASS is a multi-frequency array of four tel
escopes operating from a high-altitude site in the Atacama Desert in Chile. CLASS will survey 70% of the sky in four frequency bands centered at 38, 93, 148, and 217 GHz, which are chosen to straddle the Galactic-foreground minimum while avoiding strong atmospheric emission lines. This broad frequency coverage ensures that CLASS can distinguish Galactic emission from the CMB. The sky fraction of the CLASS survey will allow the full shape of the primordial B-mode power spectrum to be characterized, including the signal from reionization at low $ell$. Its unique combination of large sky coverage, control of systematic errors, and high sensitivity will allow CLASS to measure or place upper limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio at a level of $r=0.01$ and make a cosmic-variance-limited measurement of the optical depth to the surface of last scattering, $tau$.
Birefringent crystals are extensively used to manipulate polarized light. The generalized transfer matrix developed allows efficient calculation of the full polarization state of light transmitted through and reflected by a stack of arbitrarily-many
discrete layers of isotropic and birefringent materials at any frequency and angle of incidence. The matrix of a uniaxial birefringent crystal with arbitrary rotation is calculated, along with its reduction to the matrix of an isotropic medium. This method is of great practical importance where tight control of systematic effects is needed in optical systems employing birefringent crystals, one example being wave plates used by cosmic microwave background polarimetry with wide field-of-view telescopes.
