EBEX: a balloon-borne CMB polarization experiment

By B. Reichborn-Kjennerud, A. Aboobaker, P. Ade, F. Aubin, C. Baccigalupi, C. Bao, J. Borrill, C. Cantalupo, D. Chapman, J. Didier and 36 more. Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

EBEX is a NASA-funded balloon-borne experiment designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Observations will be made using 1432 transition edge sensor (TES) bolometric detectors read out with frequency multiplexed SQuIDs. EBEX will observe in three frequency bands centered at 150, 250, and 410 GHz, with 768, 384, and 280 detectors in each band, respectively. This broad frequency coverage is designed to provide valuable information about polarized foreground signals from dust. The polarized sky signals will be modulated with an achromatic half wave plate (AHWP) rotating on a superconducting magnetic bearing (SMB) and analyzed with a fixed wire grid polarizer. EBEX will observe a patch covering ~1% of the sky with 8' resolution, allowing for observation of the angular power spectrum from l = 20 to 1000. This will allow EBEX to search for both the primordial B-mode signal predicted by inflation and the anticipated lensing B-mode signal. Calculations to predict EBEX constraints on r using expected noise levels show that, for a likelihood centered around zero and with negligible foregrounds, 99% of the area falls below r = 0.035. This value increases by a factor of 1.6 after a process of foreground subtraction. This estimate does not include systematic uncertainties. An engineering flight was launched in June, 2009, from Ft. Sumner, NM, and the long duration science flight in Antarctica is planned for 2011. These proceedings describe the EBEX instrument and the North American engineering flight.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad54f821f214943c018512a3b0a37fee1fc50597

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Detection of B-mode polarization at degree angular scales by BICEP2. (2014, methodology): “The search for inflationary B-modes at larger scales will also be a goal of these experiments, as well as other ongoing experimental efforts in the US that include the ABS (Hileman et al. 2009), ACTPOL (Niemack et al. 2010), and CLASS (Eimer et al. 2012) ground-based telescopes and the EBEX (Reichbo”
PRISM (Polarized Radiation Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission): an extended white paper (2013, methodology): “rameter based on the B-mode polarization, r˘<0:7 (95% c.l.). A few more experiments are currently in operation or in the data analysis stage, including BICEP/Keck [18], SPTpol [136], ABS [1], EBEX [71], POLARBEAR [174], and a few more scheduled for the deployment within a year or so (e.g., QUIJOT”
Inflation and String Theory (2014, methodology): “There are many experiments looking for B-modes on degree scales, including KeckArray [139], EBEX [140], SPIDER [141], ABS [142], and CLASS [143]); and on arcminute scales, including POLARBEAR [144], SPTpol [145], and ACTpol [146]).”
CMB-S4: Forecasting Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves (2020, background): “…Kusaka et al. 2018); BICEP/Keck (Hivon & Kamionkowski 2002; Yoon et al. 2006; Nguyen et al. 2008; BICEP2/Keck Array Collaborations VI 2016); EBEX (Reichborn-Kjennerud et al. 2010; Abitbol et al. 2018); Planck (Planck Collaboration 2006; Planck Collaboration X 2018); POLARBEAR (Lee et al. 2008;…”
The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves (2015, background): “EBEX (Reichborn-Kjennerud et al. 2010), LSPE (Aiola et al. 2012), PIPER (Lazear et al. 2014), and SPIDER (Crill et al. 2008), are balloon experiments, the latter two of which target larger areas of the sky than most of the small-sky ground-based missions.”