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Empirical modelling of the BLASTPol achromatic half-wave plate for precision submillimetre polarimetry
journal contribution
posted on 2023-07-26, 13:59 authored by Lorenzo Moncelsi, Peter A. R. Ade, Francesco E. Angile, Steven J. Benton, Mark J. Devlin, Laura M. Fissel, Natalie N. Gandilo, Joshua O. Gundersen, Tristan G. Matthews, C. Barth Netterfield, Giles Novak, David Nutter, Enzo Pascale, Frederick Poidevin, Giorgio Savini, Douglas Scott, Juan Diego Soler, Locke D. Spencer, Matthew D. P. Truch, Gregory S. Tucker, Jin ZhangA 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.
History
Refereed
- Yes
Volume
437Issue number
3Page range
2772-2789Publication title
Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical SocietyISSN
1365-2966External DOI
Publisher
Oxford University PressLanguage
- other
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Legacy posted date
2016-11-25Legacy creation date
2016-11-18Legacy Faculty/School/Department
ARCHIVED Faculty of Science & Technology (until September 2018)Usage metrics
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