Astrophysics, Gravitation and Cosmology Seminar - Elle Shaw (UIUC) "The Second Flight of the SPIDER CMB Polarimeter"
- Event Type
- Seminar/Symposium
- Sponsor
- Department of Physics
- Location
- Loomis 464
- Date
- May 3, 2023 12:00 pm
- Speaker
- Elle Shaw
- Contact
- Brandy Koebbe
- bkoebbe@illinois.edu
- Views
- 75
- Originating Calendar
- Physics - Astrophysics, Relativity, and Cosmology Seminar
Spider is a balloon-borne millimeter-wave polarimeter designed to target B-mode polarization at large angular scales in the Cosmic Microwave Background. These divergence-free B-mode patterns are predicted in inflationary models, and the detection (or non-detection) of their signature on the sky gives constraints on key cosmological parameters such as the tensor-to-scalar ratio r. SPIDER’s first flight in 2015 deployed three 95 GHz and three 150 GHz receivers. In December 2022, SPIDER flew for the second time, with three new receivers tuned to 280 GHz for sensitivity to galactic dust emissions and foregrounds. In my talk I will discuss results from SPIDER’s 2015 flight, the 2022 Antarctic deployment, and the in-flight 280 GHz instrument and detector performance.