Design and Performance of 30/40 GHz Diplexed Focal Plane for BICEP Array

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel wide-band diplexed focal plane design for cosmic microwave background polarimetry, demonstrating effective dual-band operation at 30 and 40 GHz with high optical quality.

Contribution

The work introduces a new diplexed focal plane architecture with integrated filters and phased array antennas for dual-band CMB observations, achieving minimal reflection loss and good beam characteristics.

Findings

Successful dual-band operation at 30 and 40 GHz

Optical efficiency of 20-30% with some impedance mismatch

Good beam quality with low ellipticity and polarization differences

Abstract

We demonstrate a wide-band diplexed focal plane suitable for observing low-frequency foregrounds that are important for cosmic microwave background polarimetry. The antenna elements are composed of slotted bowtie antennas with 60% bandwidth that can be partitioned into two bands. Each pixel is composed of two interleaved 12$\times$12 pairs of linearly polarized antenna elements forming a phased array, designed to synthesize a symmetric beam with no need for focusing optics. The signal from each antenna element is captured in-phase and uniformly weighted by a microstrip summing tree. The antenna signal is diplexed into two bands through the use of two complementary, six-pole Butterworth filters. This filter architecture ensures a contiguous impedance match at all frequencies, and thereby achieves minimal reflection loss between both bands. Subsequently, out-of-band rejection is increased with a bandpass filter and the signal is then deposited on a transition-edge sensor bolometer island. We demonstrate the performance of this focal plane with two distinct bands, 30 and 40 GHz, each with a bandwidth of $\sim$20 and 15 GHz, respectively. The unequal bandwidths between the two bands are caused by an unintentional shift in diplexer frequency from its design values. The end-to-end optical efficiency of these detectors are relatively modest, at 20-30%, with an efficiency loss due to an unknown impedance mismatch in the summing tree. Far-field beam maps show good optical characteristics with edge pixels having no more than $\sim$ 5% ellipticity and $\sim$10-15% peak-to-peak differences for A-B polarization pairs.