Initial Performance of BICEP3: A Degree Angular Scale 95 GHz Band Polarimeter

Understand

BICEP3 is a $550~mm$ aperture telescope with cold, on-axis, refractive optics designed to observe at the $95~GHz$ band from the South Pole.

• It is the newest member of the BICEP/Keck family of inflationary probes specifically designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree-angular scales.
• BICEP3 is designed to house 1280 dual-polarization pixels, which, when fully-populated, totals to $\sim$9$\times$ the number of pixels in a single Keck $95~GHz$ receiver, thus further advancing the BICEP/Keck program's $95~GHz$ mapping speed.
• BICEP3 was deployed during the austral summer of 2014-2015 with 9 detector tiles, to be increased to its full capacity of 20 in the second season.