Validation and Testing of the Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope and Data Reduction Pipeline

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Degree type
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
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Physics and Astronomy
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Astrophysics and Astronomy
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01/01/2024
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Bhandarkar, Tanay
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Abstract

The advancement of theories of modern cosmology, such as Λ-CDM, is dependent on high precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Several generations of CMB experiments have sought to advance our understanding of cosmology by improving both instrument sensitivity and resolution. The Simons Observatory (SO) is an upcoming CMB survey, consisting of six Small Aperture Telescopes (SATs) and one Large Aperture Telescope (LAT). While the SATs will focus on mapping the divergence-free polarized CMB signal on large scales, the LAT will produce arcminute resolution CMB temperature and polarization maps at an unprecedented sensitivity. The Large Aperture Telescope Receiver (LATR) is a sub-kelvin cryostat that will occupy the focal plan of the LAT with >60,000 transition edge sensors. This volume of detectors will enable the production of deep CMB temperatue maps, but also presents a novel data management problem. Handling all the data that is produced by the LAT requires a robust and automated data reduction pipeline. This pipeline will need to be capable of applying data cleaning techniques, such as glitch detection, time-ordered data detrending, and common mode subtraction across thousands of detector time streams. With the cleaned data, the pipeline will also produce science quality maps, source catalogs, power spectra and much more. In this work, we will describe the efforts to validate the LATR's cryogenic, mechanical, detector and readout systems, as well as detail the integration of the receiver and telescope. We will also show the work done on the data reduction pipeline, and demonstrate how it will be prepared to handle the data recorded by the LAT, once it comes online. We provide an overview of the SO data reduction pipeline, and describe the pipeline testing efforts on simulated and archival CMB data.

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Devlin, Mark, J
Date of degree
2024
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