Speaker
Description
Taurus is a mid-latitude super-pressure balloon mission to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over about 70% of the sky, in four bands from 150 - 350 GHz, and with high fidelity on very large angular scales. The signal on these scales is sensitive to the timing and details of cosmic reionization by the first stars. Knowing the total optical depth of the reionized universe (τ) is also crucial to break degeneracies with other cosmological parameters, most notably the amplitude of scalar fluctuations and the sum of neutrino masses.
From its stratospheric balloon platform, Taurus will escape most of Earth's atmosphere and observe with a strategy designed to mitigate instrumental systematic errors on large scales. Balloon missions enable extremely sensitive detectors, minimal systematic contamination from the atmosphere, and access to high frequency bands critical to disentangling CMB signal from Galactic dust emission. Newer super-pressure balloons provide long-duration flights with access to the entire night sky from middle latitudes. With a month-long flight, Taurus can measure the optical depth τ with sensitivity approaching the sample variance limit. This measurement, and Taurus's high frequency maps, will serve as a force multiplier for other upcoming CMB experiments, greatly expanding what we can achieve as a community.
| Would you be interested in presenting a poster if the conference is oversubcribed? | Yes |
|---|
