Performance of a metal mesh half wave plate designed for sub-mm studies

Braithwaite, Charlotte, Pisano, Giampaolo ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4302-5681, Tucker, Carole ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1851-3918, Lewis, Richard ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1859-0021, Sudiwala, Rashmikant ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3240-5304, Veenendaal, Ian and Hargrave, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3109-6629 2026. Performance of a metal mesh half wave plate designed for sub-mm studies. Presented at: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2026, Copenhagen, Denmark, 5-10 July 2026. Published in: Zmuidzinas, Jonas and Gao, Jian-Rong eds. Proceedings of SPIE, Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy XIII. , vol.14156 SPIE, p. 187. 10.1117/12.3102070

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Experimental characterisation of polarisation modulators prior to installation in telescopes is essential to understand their performance and identify any issues arising from the design and manufacturing process. Previously, experiments have only included on-axis measurements, however, it is also important to measure the performance at the maximum operational angles of incidence due to changes that may arise in the performance of the device. With future wide-field sub-mm instruments planning to include metal mesh HWPs as polarisation modulators it is essential to characterise the off-axis performance for this type of device. In this report we describe the methodology and present results for on- and off- axis measurements of a prototype metal mesh HWP designed for CMB studies. We present initial findings which indicate a small dependency on the orientation of which face of the HWP is presented to the sky first and discuss further work required to account for any signal losses.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item - published (Poster)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
Publisher:	SPIE
Last Modified:	05 Aug 2026 00:14
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/188220

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item