The POLARBEAR-2 Experiment

Abstract

We present an overview of the design and development of the POLARBEAR-2 experiment. The POLARBEAR-2 experiment is a cosmic microwave background polarimetry experiment, which aims to characterize the small angular scale B-mode signal due to gravitational lensing and search for the large angular scale B-mode signal from inflationary gravitational waves. The experiment will have a 365 mm diameter multi-chroic focal plane filled with 7,588 polarization sensitive antenna-coupled Transition Edge Sensor bolometers and will observe at 95 and 150 GHz. The focal plane is cooled to 250 mK. The bolometers will be read-out by SQUIDs with $$32\times $$ frequency domain multiplexing. The experiment will utilize high purity alumina lenses and thermal filters to achieve the required high optical throughput. A continuously rotating, cooled half-wave plate will be used to give stringent control over systematic errors. The experiment is designed to achieve a noise equivalent temperature of 5.7 $$\mu $$ K $$\sqrt{s}$$ , and this allows us to constrain the signal from the inflationary primordial gravitational corresponding to a tensor-to-scalar ratio of $$r = 0.01$$ ( $$2\sigma $$ ). POLARBEAR-2 will also be able to put a constraint on the sum of neutrino masses to 90 meV ( $$1\sigma $$ ) with POLARBEAR-2 data alone and 65 meV ( $$1\sigma $$ ) when combined with the Planck satellite. We plan to start observations in 2014 in the Atacama Desert in Chile.