Dr. Bustos-Placencia, Ricardo

The sky-averaged cosmological 21 cm signal can improve our understanding of the evolution of the early Universe from the Dark Age to the end of the Epoch of Reionization. Although the EDGES experiment reported an absorption profile of this signal, there have been concerns about the plausibility of these results, motivating independent validation experiments. One of these initiatives is the Mapper of the IGM Spin Temperature (MIST), which is planned to be deployed at different remote locations around the world. One of its key features is that it seeks to comprehensively compensate for systematic uncertainties through detailed modeling and characterization of its different instrumental subsystems, particularly its antenna. Here we propose a novel optimizing scheme which can be used to design an antenna applied to MIST, improving bandwidth, return loss, and beam chromaticity. This new procedure combines the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm with a commercial electromagnetic simulation software (HFSS). We improved the performance of two antenna models: a rectangular blade antenna, similar to the one used in the EDGES experiment, and a trapezoidal bow-tie antenna. Although the performance of both antennas improved after applying our optimization method, we found that our bow-tie model outperforms the blade antenna by achieving lower reflection losses and beam chromaticity in the entire band of interest. To further validate the optimization process, we also built and characterized 1:20 scale models of both antenna types showing an excellent agreement with our simulations.

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a telescope array that observes the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over 75% of the sky from the Atacama Desert, Chile, at frequency bands centered near 40, 90, 150, and 220 GHz. CLASS measures the large angular scale (1°  θ  90°) CMB polarization to constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio at the r ∼ 0.01 level and the optical depth to last scattering to the sample variance limit. This paper presents the optical characterization of the 40 GHz telescope during its first observation era, from 2016 September to 2018 February. High signal-to-noise observations of the Moon establish the pointing and beam calibration. The telescope boresight pointing variation is <0°. 023 (<1.6% of the beam’s full width at half maximum (FWHM)). We estimate beam parameters per detector and in aggregate, as in the CMB survey maps. The aggregate beam has an FWHM of 1°. 579 ± 0°.001 and a solid angle of 838 ± 6 μsr, consistent with physical optics simulations. The corresponding beam window function has a sub-percent error per multipole at ℓ < 200. An extended 90° beam map reveals no significant far sidelobes. The observed Moon polarization shows that the instrument polarization angles are consistent with the optical model and that the temperature-to-polarization leakage fraction is <10−4 (95% C.L.). We find that the Moon-based results are consistent with measurements of M42, RCW 38, and Tau A from CLASS’s CMB survey data. In particular, Tau A measurements establish degree level precision for instrument polarization angles.

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a four-telescope array observing the largest angular scales (2 < ℓ < 200) of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization. These scales encode information about reionization and inflation during the early universe. The instrument stability necessary to observe these angular scales from the ground is achieved through the use of a variable-delay polarization modulator as the first optical element in each of the CLASS telescopes. Here, we develop a demodulation scheme used to extract the polarization timestreams from the CLASS data and apply this method to selected data from the first 2 yr of observations by the 40 GHz CLASS telescope. These timestreams are used to measure the 1/f noise and temperature-to-polarization (T → P) leakage present in the CLASS data. We find a median knee frequency for the pair-differenced demodulated linear polarization of 15.12 mHz and a T → P leakage of <3.8 × 10−4 (95% confidence) across the focal plane. We examine the sources of 1/f noise present in the data and find the component of 1/f due to atmospheric precipitable water vapor (PWV) has an amplitude of 203 12 K s  m RJ for 1 mm of PWV when evaluated at 10 mHz; accounting for ∼17% of the 1/f noise in the central pixels of the focal plane. The low levels of T → P leakage and 1/f noise achieved through the use of a front-end polarization modulator are requirements for observing of the largest angular scales of the CMB polarization by the CLASS telescopes.

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a polarization-sensitive telescope array located at an altitude of 5,200 m in the Chilean Atacama Desert and designed to measure the polarized Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over large angular scales. The CLASS array is currently observing with three telescopes covering four frequency bands: one at 40 GHz (Q); one at 90 GHz (W1); and one dichroic system at 150/220 GHz (HF). During the austral winter of 2022, we upgraded the first 90 GHz telescope (W1) by replacing four of the seven focal plane modules. These new modules contain detector wafers with an updated design, aimed at improving the optical efficiency and detector stability. We present a description of the design changes and measurements of on-sky optical efficiencies derived from observations of Jupiter.