The primary emphasis of our research group has been the establishment of experimental infrastructure at the University of Iceland. Within the scope of that effort, our main effort as revolved around the design and construction of a novel optomechanical systems that enable high-fidelity cryogenic measurements of microwave components and telescope for experiments observing the cosmic microwave background. One of the first demonstrations of our infrastructure and methodology development is described in Balafendiev et al., 2024.
In addition, our work activities and main achievements include:
Theme 1: The construction of a 6.95 x 2.4 x 2.6 m anechoic chamber to facilitate holography measurements at both room and cryogenic temperatures.
Theme 1: The design, procurement, assembly, and testing of a custom phase-sensitive measurement equipment for the 75–110 and 220–330 GHz frequency range. Those custom systems have been found to compare well with off-the-shelf components, however, the custom systems enable high-fidelity measurements of various optical components at cryogenic temperatures. The successful use of these components at microwave temperatures is a key goal within Theme 1.
Theme 1: Gascard et al. (2024) presents the design, simulation, and validation of CryoSim, a parameterized cryostat model for generic cryostats that can be used for optical testing in cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. CryoSim integrates mechanical and thermal analyses, enabling rapid optimization of cryostat configurations.
Theme 2: Beam calibration of the Simons Observatory Small Aperture Telescopes which saw first light in year 2023. The first scientific result of that work is described in Dachlythra et al., 2024.
Theme 2: The advancing of beamconv time-domain simulations. Adler et al. (2024) discusses the simulation of systematic errors in the Taurus experiment, a balloon-borne mission designed to measure cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization, particularly focusing on large-scale E-mode polarization and the optical depth to reionization.
Theme 2: Monelli et al. (2023) uses beamconv to generate time-domain simulations for a generic CMB satellite mission scanning the sky with a non-ideal half-wave plate to study how those non-idealities impact our ability to study parity violating physics through observables in the CMB angular power spectra.
