Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS): 90 GHz Telescope Pointing, Beam Profile, Window Function, and Polarization Performance

TL;DR

This paper details the optical and polarization performance of the CLASS 90 GHz telescope, including pointing accuracy, beam profile, window function, and polarization calibration, based on three years of observational data from the Atacama Desert.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive optical characterization and calibration results of the CLASS 90 GHz telescope, including pointing, beam, and polarization performance metrics.

Findings

Pointing errors are within 2 arcminutes, about 7% of the beam FWHM.

Beam FWHM is measured at 0.620 degrees with a well-characterized window function.

Instrumental temperature-to-polarization leakage is below 0.2%.

Abstract

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a telescope array that observes the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over ~75% of the sky from the Atacama Desert, Chile, at frequency bands centered near 40, 90, 150, and 220 GHz. CLASS measures the large angular scale CMB polarization to constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the optical depth to last scattering. This paper presents the optical characterization of the 90GHz telescope, which has been observing since July 2018. Observations of the Moon establish the pointing while dedicated observations of Jupiter are used for beam calibration. The standard deviations of the pointing error in azimuth, elevation, and boresight angle are 1.3, 2.1, and 2.0 arcminutes, respectively, over the first 3 years of observations. This corresponds to a pointing uncertainty ~7% of the beam's full width at half maximum (FWHM). The effective azimuthally-symmetrized instrument 1D beam estimated at 90 GHz has an FWHM of 0.620+/-0.003 deg and a solid angle of 138.7+/-0.6(stats.)+/-1.1(sys.) usr integrated to a radius of 4 deg. The corresponding beam window function drops to b_ell^2 = 0.93, 0.71, 0.14 at ell = 30, 100, 300, respectively. Far-sidelobes are studied using detector-centered intensity maps of the Moon and measured to be at a level of 10^-3 or below relative to the peak. The polarization angle of Tau A estimated from preliminary survey maps is 149.6+/-0.2(stats.) deg in equatorial coordinates. The instrumental temperature-to-polarization (T-to-P) leakage fraction, inferred from per-detector demodulated Jupiter scan data, has a monopole component at the level of 1.7 x 10^-3, a dipole component with an amplitude of 4.3 x 10^-3, with no evidence of quadrupolar leakage.