Empirical modelling of the BLASTPol achromatic half-wave plate for precision submillimetre polarimetry
- Creators
- Moncelsi, Lorenzo
- Ade, Peter A. R.
- Angilè, Francesco E.
- Benton, Steven J.
- Devlin, Mark J.
- Fissel, Laura M.
- Gandilo, Natalie N.
- Gundersen, Joshua O.
- Matthews, Tristan G.
- Netterfield, C. Barth
- Novak, Giles
- Nutter, David
- Pascale, Enzo
- Poidevin, Frédérick
- Savini, Giorgio
- Scott, Douglas
- Soler, Juan Diego
- Spencer, Locke D.
- Truch, Matthew D. P.
- Tucker, Gregory S.
- Zhang, Jin
Abstract
A cryogenic achromatic half-wave plate (HWP) for submillimetre astronomical polarimetry has been designed, manufactured, tested and deployed in the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol). The design is based on the five-slab Pancharatnam recipe and itworks in thewavelength range 200–600 μm, making it the broadestband HWP built to date at (sub)millimetre wavelengths. The frequency behaviour of the HWP has been fully characterized at room and cryogenic temperatures with incoherent radiation from a polarizing Fourier transform spectrometer. We develop a novel empirical model, complementary to the physical and analytical ones available in the literature, that allows us to recover the HWP Mueller matrix and phase shift as a function of frequency and extrapolated to 4 K. We show that most of the HWP non-idealities can be modelled by quantifying one wavelength-dependent parameter, the position of the HWP equivalent axes, which is then readily implemented in a map-making algorithm. We derive this parameter for a range of spectral signatures of input astronomical sources relevant to BLASTPol, and provide a benchmark example of how our method can yield improved accuracy on measurements of the polarization angle on the sky at submillimetre wavelengths.
Additional Information
© 2013 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2013 October 24. Received 2013 October 22; in original form 2013 August 23. First published online: November 28, 2013. The BLASTPol collaboration acknowledges the support of NASA through grant numbers NAG5-12785, NAG5-13301 and NNGO-6GI11G, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Innovation Trust, the Puerto Rico Space Grant Consortium, the Fondo Institucional para la Investigacion of the University of Puerto Rico, the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.Attached Files
Published - MNRAS-2014-Moncelsi-2772-89.pdf
Submitted - 1208.4866v3.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 43506
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20140124-104351652
- NAG5-12785
- NASA
- NAG5-13301
- NASA
- NNGO-6GI11G
- NASA
- Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Canada Foundation for Innovation
- Ontario Innovation Trust
- Puerto Rico Space Grant Consortium
- University of Puerto Rico
- NSF
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
- Created
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2014-01-29Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field