Browsing by Author "Buder, I."

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    The Q/U imaging experiment instrument
    (The American Astronomical Society, 2013) Biscoff, C.; Brizius, A.; Zwart, J.; Buder, I.; Chinone, Y.; Cleary, K.; Dumoulin, R.N.; Kusaka, A.; Monsalve, R.; Naess, S.K.; Newburgh, L.B.; Nixon, G.; Reeves, R.; Smith, K.M.; Vanderlinde, K.; Wehus, I.K.; Bogdan, M.; Bustos, R.; Church, S.E.; Davis, Robert; Dickenson, C.; Eriksen, H.K.; Gaier, T.; Gundersen, J.O.; Hasegawa, M.; Hazumi, M.; Holler, C.; Huffenberger, K.M.; Imbriale, W.A.; Ishidoshiro, K.; Jones, M.E.; Kangaslahti, P.; Kapner, D.J.; Lawrence, C.R.; Leitch, E.M.; Limon, M.; McMahon, J.J.; Miller, A.D.; Nagai, M.; Nguyen, H.; Pearson, T.J.; Piccirillo, L.; Radford, S.J.E.; Readhead, A.C.S.; Richards, J.L.; Samtleben, D.; Seiffert, M.; Shepherd, M.C.; Staggs, S.T.; Tajima, O.; Thompson, K.L.; Williamson, R.; Winstein, B.; Wollack, E.J.
    The Q/U Imaging ExperimenT (QUIET) is designed to measure polarization in the cosmic microwave background, targeting the imprint of inflationary gravitational waves at large angular scales(∼1◦). Between 2008 October and 2010 December, two independent receiver arrays were deployed sequentially on a 1.4m side-fed Dragonian telescope. The polarimeters that form the focal planes use a compact design based on high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) that provides simultaneous measurements of the Stokes parameters Q, U, and I in a single module. The 17-element Q-band polarimeter array, with a central frequency of 43.1 GHz, has the best sensitivity (69 μKs1/2) and the lowest instrumental systematic errors ever achieved in this band, contributing to the tensor-to-scalar ratio at r < 0.1. The 84-element W-band polarimeter array has a sensitivity of 87 μKs1/2 at a central frequency of 94.5 GHz. It has the lowest systematic errors to date, contributing at r < 0.01. The two arrays together cover multipoles in the range ∼ 25–975. These are the largest HEMT-based arrays deployed to date. This article describes the design, calibration, performance, and sources of systematic error of the instrument.