Oxford Experimental Radio/mm Cosmology

Research Projects

The C-Band All Sky Survey (C-BASS), will map the whole sky in temperature and polarization at 5GHz. The receiver will be developed jointly by the University of Manchester, the University of Oxford, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. It will be deployed on 6-m class telescopes at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and at the Karoo Array Telescope site of the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) . in South Africa. Caltech and HartRAO will provide the necessary on-site logistical support as well as the use of the respective telescopes, and Caltech will also provide the data acquisition system. Oxford, Manchester, Caltech and Rhodes University (SA) will jointly run the data analysis and scientific exploitation.

The primary aim of C-BASS will be to allow accurate subtraction of the Galactic synchrotron polarization from the data produced by CMB polarization experiments, including WMAP, Planck, CLOVER, and ultimately a future satellite designed to measure the polarization B-mode, whose amplitude is a measure of the energy scale of inflation. To achieve this, the minimum requirement is an rms noise of <0.1 mK per pixel, and an accuracy of 5% on scales up to 10±. In practice the noise will be substantially lower. Our goal is to reduce systematic errors well below the 5% level, and on angular scales up to the quadrupole, in order to complement a B-mode satellite.

The official C-BASS webpage can be found here.