Submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Preprint typeset using L ATEX style emulateapj v. 14/09/00 MEASURING POLARIZATION WITH DASI

We describe an experiment to measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), a compact microwave interferometer optimized to detect CMB anisotropy at multipoles l ≃ 140 – 900. The telescope has operated at the Amundsen-Scott Sout...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: E. M. Leitch, J. M. Kovac, C. Pryke, B. Reddall, M. Dragovan, E. Carlstrom, N. W. Halverson, W. L. Holzapfel
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2002
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.315.7177
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0209476v1.pdf
Description
Summary:We describe an experiment to measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), a compact microwave interferometer optimized to detect CMB anisotropy at multipoles l ≃ 140 – 900. The telescope has operated at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole research station since 2000 January. The telescope was retrofit as a polarimeter during the 2000 – 2001 austral summer, and throughout the 2001 and 2002 austral winters has made observations of the CMB with sensitivity to all four Stokes parameters. The telescope performance has been extensively characterized through observations of artificial sources, the Moon, and polarized and unpolarized Galactic sources. In 271 days of observation, DASI has differenced the CMB fluctuations in two fields to an rms noise level of 2.8 µK. 1. introduction The DASI experiment, previously described in Leitch et al. (2002) (hereafter Paper I), is an interferometric array designed to measure anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The telescope was deployed to the