BICEP Array Detectors and Instrumentation at 30/40 GHz: Design, Performance, and Deployment to the South Pole for Constraining Primordial Gravitational Waves ...

• Main Author: Mohamed Soliman, Ahmed
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: California Institute of Technology 2023
• Subjects: Inflation; detectors.; cosmology; cryogenic instrumentation; Galactic Foregrounds, telescopes; BICEP Array; Big Bang; CMB polarimeters; Cosmic Microwave Background; primordial gravitational waves; Applied Physics; Amundsen Scott South Pole Station; Amundsen-Scott; Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7907/srdx-w019; https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05232023-174453276

The discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in the 1960s has provided strong observational evidence for the Big Bang cosmological model to describe the origin and evolution of the universe. The theory of cosmic inflation was developed in the 1980s to account for the initial density perturbations by a period of exponential expansion in the early Universe to solve the horizon, flatness and monopole problems. Many inflation models predict potentially detectable primordial gravitational-waves (PGWs) background that imprint a B-mode polarization pattern in the CMB. The amplitude of the inflationary B-mode polarization depends on the energy scale of inflation and is parameterized by the tensor-to-scalar ratio r. The detection of a B-mode pattern would open a new window to probe the energy scale at the beginning of time when the universe was a mere fraction of a second old after the Big Bang. The BICEP/Keck collaboration is building a series of experiments located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station ...