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Two-year Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) Observations: A First Detection of Atmospheric Circular Polarization at Q band
Petroff, Matthew A.
Eimer, Joseph R.
Harrington, Kathleen
Ali, Aamir
Appel, John W.
Bennett, Charles L.
Brewer, Michael K.
Chan, Manwei
Chuss, David T.
Cleary, Joseph
Denes Couto, Jullianna
Dahal, Sumit
Dünner, Rolando
Essinger-Hileman, Thomas
Fluxá Rojas, Pedro
Gothe, Dominik
Iuliano, Jeffrey
Marriage, Tobias A.
Miller, Nathan J.
Núñez, Carolina
Padilla, Ivan L.
Parker, Lucas
Reeves, Rodrigo
Rostem, Karwan
Nunes Valle, Deniz Augusto
Watts, Duncan J.
Weiland, Janet L.
Wollack, Edward J.
Xu, Zhilei
Astrophysical Journal
2020
The Earth’s magnetic field induces Zeeman splitting of the magnetic dipole transitions of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere, which produces polarized emission in the millimeter-wave regime. This polarized emission is primarily circularly polarized and manifests as a foreground with a dipole-shaped sky pattern for polarizationsensitive ground-based cosmic microwave background experiments, such as the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), which is capable of measuring large angular scale circular polarization. Using atmospheric emission theory and radiative transfer formalisms, we model the expected amplitude and spatial distribution of this signal and evaluate the model for the CLASS observing site in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Then, using two years of observations at 32°. 3 to 43.7 GHz from the CLASS Q-band telescope, we present a detection of this signal and compare the observed signal to that predicted by the model. We recover an angle between magnetic north and true north of −5°. 5 ± 0°. 6, which is consistent with the expectation of −5°.9 for the CLASS observing site. When comparing dipole sky patterns fit to both simulated and data-derived sky maps, the dipole directions match to within a degree, and the measured amplitudes match to within ∼20%.
Cosmic microwave background radiation
Observational cosmology
Polarimeters
Astronomical instrumentation
Atmospheric effects
Ciencias físicas