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Empirical modelling of the BLASTPol achromatic half-wave plate for precision submillimetre polarimetry

Moncelsi, L., Ade, Peter A. R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5127-0401, Angile, F. E., Benton, S. J., Devlin, M. J., Fissel, L. M., Gandilo, N. N., Gundersen, J. O., Matthews, T. G., Netterfield, C. B., Novak, G., Nutter, David John, Pascale, Enzo ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3242-8154, Poidevin, F., Savini, Giorgio, Scott, D., Soler, J. D., Spencer, Locke, Truch, M. D. P., Tucker, G. S. and Zhang, Jin 2014. Empirical modelling of the BLASTPol achromatic half-wave plate for precision submillimetre polarimetry. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 437 (3) , pp. 2772-2789. 10.1093/mnras/stt2090

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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 it works in the wavelength range 200–600 μm, making it the broadest-band 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.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Physics and Astronomy
Subjects: Q Science > QB Astronomy
Uncontrolled Keywords: magnetic fields; polarization; balloons; instrumentation: polarimeters; techniques: polarimetric; submillimetre: ISM
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISSN: 0035-8711
Funders: Leverhulme
Date of Acceptance: 24 October 2013
Last Modified: 25 Oct 2022 09:34
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/59178

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