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The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a telescope array observing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) at frequency bands centered near 40, 90, 150, and 220 GHz. CLASS measures the CMB polarization on the largest angular scales to constrain the inflationary tensor-to-scalar ratio and the optical depth due to reionization. To achieve the long time-scale stability necessary for this measurement from the ground, CLASS utilizes a front-end, variable-delay polarization modulator on each telescope. Here we report on the improvements in stability afforded by front-end modulation using data across all four CLASS frequencies. Across one month of modulated linear polarization data in 2021, CLASS achieved median knee frequencies of 9.1, 29.1, 20.4, and 36.4 mHz for the 40, 90, 150, and 220 GHz observing bands. The knee frequencies are approximately an order of magnitude lower than achieved via CLASS pair-differencing orthogonal detector pairs without modulation. 

Polarization modulation is a powerful technique to increase the stability of measurements by enabling the distinction of a polarized signal from dominant slow system drifts and unpolarized foregrounds. Furthermore, when placed as close to the sky as possible, modulation can reduce systematic errors from instrument polarization. In this work, we introduce the design and preliminary drive system laboratory performance of a new 60 cm diameter reflective half-wave plate (RHWP) polarization modulator. The wave plate consists of a wire array situated in front of a flat mirror. Using 50 μm diameter wires with 175 μm spacing, the wave plate will be suitable for operation in the millimeter wavelength range with flatness of the wires and parallelism to the mirror held to a small fraction of a wavelength. The presented design targets the 77-108 GHz range. Modulation is performed by a rotation of the wave plate with a custom rotary drive utilizing an actively controlled servo motor. 

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) telescope array surveys 75% of the sky from the Atacama desert in Chile at frequency bands centered near 40, 90, 150, and 220 GHz. CLASS measures the largest-angular scale (θ ≳ 1 ° ) CMB polarization with the aim of constraining the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, measuring the optical depth to reionization, τ , to near the cosmic variance limit, and more. The CLASS Q-band (40 GHz), W-band (90 GHz), and dichroic high frequency (150/220 GHz) telescopes have been observing since June 2016, May 2018, and September 2019, respectively. On-sky optical characterization of the 40 GHz instrument has been published. Here, we present preliminary on-sky measurements of the beams at 90, 150, and 220 GHz, and pointing stability of the 90 and 150/220 GHz telescopes. The average 90, 150, and 220 GHz beams measured from dedicated observations of Jupiter have full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 0.615±0.019° , 0.378±0.005° , and 0.266 ± 0.008° , respectively. Telescope pointing variations are within a few % of the beam FWHM. 

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a polarization-sensitive telescope array located at an altitude of 5,200 m in the Chilean Atacama Desert. CLASS is designed to measure "E-mode" (even parity) and "B-mode" (odd parity) polarization patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over large angular scales with the aim of improving our understanding of inflation, reionization, and dark matter. CLASS is currently observing with three telescopes covering four frequency bands: one at 40 GHz (Q); one at 90 GHz (W1); and one dichroic system at 150/220 GHz (G). In these proceedings, we discuss the updated design and in-lab characterization of new 90 GHz detectors. The new detectors include design changes to the transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometer architecture, which aim to improve stability and optical efficiency. We assembled and tested four new detector wafers, to replace four modules of the W1 focal plane. These detectors were installed into the W1 telescope, and will achieve first light in the austral winter of 2022. We present electrothermal parameters and bandpass measurements from in-lab dark and optical testing. From in-lab dark tests, we also measure a median NEP of 12.3 aW√ s across all four wafers about the CLASS signal band, which is below the expected photon NEP of 32 aW√ s from the field. We therefore expect the new detectors to be photon noise limited. 

Abstract The current and future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments fielding kilopixel arrays of transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers require accurate and robust gain calibration methods. We simplify and refactor the standard TES model to directly relate the detector responsivity calibration and optical time constant to the measured TES current I and the applied bias current I b . The calibration method developed for the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) TES bolometer arrays relies on current versus voltage ( I – V ) measurements acquired daily prior to CMB observations. By binning Q -band (40 GHz) I – V measurements by optical loading, we find that the gain calibration median standard error within a bin is 0.3%. We test the accuracy of this I – V bin detector calibration method by using the Moon as a photometric standard. The ratio of measured Moon amplitudes between the detector pairs sharing the same feedhorn indicates a TES calibration error of 0.5%. We also find that, for the CLASS Q -band TES array, calibrating the response of individual detectors based solely on the applied TES bias current accurately corrects TES gain variations across time but introduces a bias in the TES calibration from data counts to power units. Since the TES current bias value is set and recorded before every observation, this calibration method can always be applied to the raw TES data and is not subject to I – V data quality or processing errors. 

Abstract We describe the measurement and treatment of the telescope beams for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope's fourth data release, DR4. Observations of Uranus are used to measure the central portion (<12 ' ) of the beams to roughly -40 dB of the peak. Such planet maps in intensity are used to construct azimuthally averaged beam profiles, which are fit with a physically motivated model before being transformed into Fourier space. We investigate and quantify a number of percent-level corrections to the beams, all of which are important for precision cosmology. Uranus maps in polarization are used to measure the temperature-to-polarization leakage in the main part of the beams, which is ≲ 1% (2.5%) at 150 GHz (98 GHz). The beams also have polarized sidelobes, which are measured with observations of Saturn and deprojected from the ACT time-ordered data. Notable changes relative to past ACT beam analyses include an improved subtraction of the atmospheric effects from Uranus calibration maps, incorporation of a scattering term in the beam profile model, and refinements to the beam model uncertainties and the main temperature-to-polarization leakage terms in the ACT power spectrum analysis. 

ABSTRACT Compact sources can cause scatter in the scaling relationships between the amplitude of the thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Effect (tSZE) in galaxy clusters and cluster mass. Estimates of the importance of this scatter vary – largely due to limited data on sources in clusters at the frequencies at which tSZE cluster surveys operate. In this paper, we present 90 GHz compact source measurements from a sample of 30 clusters observed using the MUSTANG2 instrument on the Green Bank Telescope. We present simulations of how a source’s flux density, spectral index, and angular separation from the cluster’s centre affect the measured tSZE in clusters detected by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). By comparing the MUSTANG2 measurements with these simulations we calibrate an empirical relationship between 1.4 GHz flux densities from radio surveys and source contamination in ACT tSZE measurements. We find 3 per cent of the ACT clusters have more than a 20 per cent decrease in Compton-y but another 3 per cent have a 10 per cent increase in the Compton-y due to the matched filters used to find clusters. As sources affect the measured tSZE signal and hence the likelihood that a cluster will be detected, testing the level of source contamination in the tSZE signal using a tSZE-selected catalogue is inherently biased. We confirm this by comparing the ACT tSZE catalogue with optically and X-ray-selected cluster catalogues. There is a strong case for a large, high-resolution survey of clusters to better characterize their source population.