| Summary: | BICEP3, the latest telescope in the BICEP/Keck program, started science observations in March 2016. It is a 550mm aperture refractive telescope observing the polarization of the cosmic microwave background at 95 GHz. We show the focal plane design and detector performance, including spectral response, optical efficiency and preliminary sensitivity of the upgraded BICEP3. We demonstrate 9.72 μKCMB√s noise performance of the BICEP3 receiver. © 2016 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). The Bicep3 project has been made possible through support from the National Science Foundation (grant Nos. 0742818, 0742592, 1044978, 1110087, 1145172, 1313158, 1313010, 1313062, 1313287, 1056465, and 0960243), the W. M. Keck Foundation, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Development Fund. The development of antenna-coupled detector technology was supported by the JPL Research and Technology Development Fund and grants 06-ARPA206-0040 and 10-SAT10-0017 from the NASA ARPA and SAT programs. The development and testing of focal planes were supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation at Caltech. The computations in these proceedings were run on the Odyssey cluster supported by the FAS Science Division Research Computing Group at Harvard University. Tireless administrative support was provided by Irene Coyle, Kathy Deniston, Donna Hernandez, and Dana Volponi. We are grateful to the staff of the US Antarctic Program and in particular the South Pole Station without whose help this research would not have been possible. We thank our Bicep1, Bicep2, Keck Array and Spider colleagues for useful discussions and shared expertise. Published - 99140T.pdf Submitted - 1607.06861v1.pdf
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