Aritoki Suzuki (UCB) "Next Generation Cosmic Microwave Background Polarimetry Experiment – Enabling Technologies for an Order of Magnitude Increase in Detector Count"

Precision measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies over the last two decades have been a spectacular success, constraining all six parameters of the LambdaCDM cosmological model to the percent level. However, while CMB temperature is well explored, current experiments are just now becoming sensitive enough to explore the rich physics of CMB polarization.
“Stage-II” CMB experiments started to deploy in early 2010’s, contain ~1,000 millimeter-wave, polarization-sensitive detectors, and have discovered B-mode polarization due to weak gravitational lensing and set limits on B-modes due to inflationary gravitational waves. “Stage-III” experiments have begun to deploy this year and contain ~10,000 detectors for an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity.
Looking to the future, the CMB community has begun studying “CMB-S4”, a “Stage-IV” experiment that will contain ~500,000 detectors, a factor ~100 increase over experiments currently in the field. The goal of CMB-S4 is to make a definitive measurement of CMB polarization from the ground in order to explore inflationary scenarios, constrain the sum of the neutrino masses, and search for new physics within the early universe.
During this presentation, I will discuss the exciting science objectives of modern CMB experiments, the tremendous technological challenge of fielding large numbers of highly-sensitive detector arrays, and the advancement in technologies we are developing to overcome these challenges to conduct the ultimate CMB polarization measurement.