The Quest for Gravity Wave B-modes

Abstract

One of the most exciting quests in all of contemporary science is to find hints that in the first tiny fraction of a second after the Big-Bang the Universe hyper-inflated by a factor of \sim 10^{60}. Such inflation will have injected gravity waves into the fabric of spacetime which will in turn have left a faint imprint in the polarization pattern of the Cosmic Microwave Background. This paper describes the history of polarization measurement, the experimental optimization of this latest search for the gravity wave imprint, and the current round of experiments and their various approaches to the challenge.