0 citations0 references

The QMAP and MAT/TOCO Experiments for Measuring Anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background

The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series2002Vol. 140(2), pp. 115–141

Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2002 papers

A. Miller, J. Beach, Stuart Bradley, Robert R. Caldwell, Henry N. Chapman, Michelle Devlin, W. B. Dorwart, T. Herbig, D. O. Jones, G. Monnelly, C. B. Netterfield, M. R. Nolta, Lyman A. Page, Jason Puchalla, T. H. Robertson, E. Torbet, H. T. Tran, W. Vinje

Abstract

We describe two related experiments that measured the anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). QMAP was a balloon-borne telescope that flew twice in 1996, collecting data on degree angular scales with an array of six high electron mobility transistor-based amplifiers (HEMTs). QMAP was the first experiment to use an interlocking scan strategy to directly produce high signal-to-noise CMB maps. The QMAP gondola was then refit for ground based work as the MAT/TOCO experiment. Observations were made from 5200 m on Cerro Toco in Northern Chile in 1997 and 1998 using time-domain beam synthesis. MAT/TOCO was the first experiment to see both the rise and fall of the CMB angular spectrum, thereby localizing the position of the first peak to l_{peak}=216 +/- 14. In addition to describing the instruments, we discuss the data selection methods, checks for systematic errors, and we compare the MAT/TOCO results to those from recent experiments. We also correct the data to account for an updated calibration and a small contribution from foreground emission. We find the amplitude of the first peak for l between 160 and 240 to be T_{peak}=80.9 +/- 3.4 +/- 5.1 uK, where the first error is statistical and the second is from calibration.

Related Papers

→ The Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum(1997)4 cited
Cosmological Parameter Estimation from CMB and X-ray clusters(2001)
→ Future projects on the Cosmic Microwave Background(2008)