by
DrLorenzo Moncelsi(California Institute of Technology)
→
Europe/Rome
Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi)
Aula Conversi
Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi
Description
SPIDER is a balloon-borne microwave polarimeter designed to
measure cosmological B-modes on degree angular scales in the presence
of Galactic foregrounds. With six independent telescopes housing a
total of ~2000 detectors in the 90 GHz and 150 GHz frequency bands,
SPIDER is the most instantaneously-sensitive CMB polarimeter deployed
on the sky to date. SPIDER was successfully launched from McMurdo
Station, Antarctica in January 2015 and acquired science data for 16
days. I will briefly cover the in-flight performance and the expected
analysis challenges. Pending recovery, the SPIDER team is already
planning the next flight, featuring one or two foreground-optimized
channels, which will allow us constrain the primordial tensor-mode
amplitude at the level of r < 0.03 (99% CL), even in the presence of
foregrounds.
