Download or read book A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization with the South Pole Telescope written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We present maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization at 90 and 150 GHz measured with SPTpol and the first EE and TE CMB power spectrum measurements from SPTpol. We also describe the SPTpol instrument in detail. We discuss the development of the SPTpol camera including the cryogenic design and the transition edge sensor (TES) detectors developed at NIST and Argonne National Laboratory. The goals of the SPTpol project are to exploit the high resolution of the telescope (1 arcminute beam) and the high sensitivity afforded by the 1536 detector camera to measure the E-mode power spectrum of the CMB, characterize the B-mode polarization induced by the gravitational lensing of the primordial E-mode CMB polarization, and to detector set an upper limit on the level of the B-mode polarization from inflationary gravitational waves. This thesis is a first step toward accomplishing these goals. Measuring the E-mode power spectrum will allow us to improve constraints on parameters of the current cosmological models that are sensitive to the damping tail of the CMB.