Initial Performance of BICEP3: A Degree Angular Scale 95 GHz Band Polarimeter
Abstract
BICEP3 is a 550~mm aperture telescope with cold, on-axis, refractive optics designed to observe at the 95~GHz band from the South Pole. It is the newest member of the BICEP/Keck family of inflationary probes specifically designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree-angular scales. BICEP3 is designed to house 1280 dual-polarization pixels, which, when fully-populated, totals to 9× the number of pixels in a single Keck 95~GHz receiver, thus further advancing the BICEP/Keck program's 95~GHz mapping speed. BICEP3 was deployed during the austral summer of 2014-2015 with 9 detector tiles, to be increased to its full capacity of 20 in the second season. After instrument characterization measurements were taken, CMB observation commenced in April 2015. Together with multi-frequency observation data from Planck, BICEP2, and the Keck Array, BICEP3 is projected to set upper limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio to r 0.03 at 95\% C.L..
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