PICO - the probe of inflation and cosmic origins

Brian M. Sutin , Marcelo Alvarez , Nicholas Battaglia , Jamie Bock , Matteo Bonato , Julian Borrill , David T. Chuss , Joelle Cooperrider , Brendan Crill , Jacques Delabrouille (1, 2) , Mark Devlin , Thomas Essinger-Hileman , Laura Fissel , Raphael Flauger , Krzysztof Gorski , Daniel Green , Shaul Hanany , Johannes Hubmayr , Bradley Johnson , William C. Jones , Lloyd Knox , Alan Kogut , Charles Lawrence , Jeff Mcmahon , Tomotake Matsumura , Mattia Negrello , Roger O'Brient , Christopher Paine , Clement Pryke , Peter Shirron , Amy Trangsrud , Qi Wen , Karl Young , Gianfranco de Zotti

1 DAP - Département d'Astrophysique (ex SAP)
2 APC (UMR_7164) - AstroParticule et Cosmologie

The Probe of Inflation and Cosmic Origins (PICO) is a NASA-funded study of a Probe-class mission concept. The toplevel science objectives are to probe the physics of the Big Bang by measuring or constraining the energy scale of inflation, probe fundamental physics by measuring the number of light particles in the Universe and the sum of neutrino masses, to measure the reionization history of the Universe, and to understand the mechanisms driving the cosmic star formation history, and the physics of the galactic magnetic field. PICO would have multiple frequency bands between 21 and 799 GHz, and would survey the entire sky, producing maps of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation, of galactic dust, of synchrotron radiation, and of various populations of point sources. Several instrument configurations, optical systems, cooling architectures, and detector and readout technologies have been and continue to be considered in the development of the mission concept. We will present a snapshot of the baseline mission concept currently under development.

Mots clés: Cosmic Microwave Background; B-Modes; Probe-class; Polarization; space mission; bolometers; cryocooling; cosmic background radiation: polarization; scale: inflation; cosmic background radiation: B-mode; magnetic field: galaxy; star: formation; neutrino: mass; history; synchrotron radiation; frequency; dust; galaxy; ionization; bolometer; big bang; readout; optical

Domaines: Instrumentations et Détecteurs [physics.ins-det]; Astrophysique [astro-ph]

Brian M. Sutin, Marcelo Alvarez, Nicholas Battaglia, Jamie Bock, Matteo Bonato, et al.. PICO - the probe of inflation and cosmic origins. SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018, Jun 2018, Austin, United States. pp.106984F, ⟨10.1117/12.2311326⟩. ⟨hal-01861892⟩