Bill Jones, Princeton University
"Searching for the Echoes of the Inflation in the Polarization of the CMB"

ABSTRACT:

I will describe Spider, an experimental effort to produce high fidelity maps of the linear Stokes parameters over 60% of the sky between 90 and 300 GHz. A new large-format focal plane architecture enables a two day flight of Spider to reach the same per-pixel noise level that Planck HFI will achieve in six months. Unlike Planck, Spider has been optimised to measure polarization, enabling a rich variety of internal consistency tests. In addition to qualifying the payload for a second long duration (30+ day) flight the following season, the first flight will provide powerful (nearly cosmic variance limited) constraints on tau and directly probe the tau, ns, r degeneracy. In addition, the data will extend the WMAP measurements of foreground polarization to higher frequencies, where the poorly understood dust component dominate the emission.

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