Studying the Cosmic Microwave Background with Spider’s First Flight

Abstract

Gravitational waves are a prediction of many early Universe models. These waves generate a divergence-free polarization component, called B-modes, of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Spider is a balloon-borne telescope designed to study the polarized emission from the CMB.

The Spider payload flew in January 2015, with detectors at 95 GHz and 150 GHz. This thesis focuses on the development and deployment of the Spider-1 payload and the analysis of the science data. In the hardware section, this thesis pays particular attention to the development of the flight cryostat and the implementation of an electrical gain monitor for characterizing time variable detector gain. In the analysis section, this thesis focuses on lowlevel data cleaning and calibrations through deprojection. In the final section, techniques for eliminating foreground contributions to CMB maps and the limitations of those techniques are discussed.

Our understanding of foregrounds currently limits our ability to measure B-modes from the CMB. Spider-2, with its 280 GHz channel, will be a powerful tool in constraining foregrounds.