The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a balloon-borne
cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimeter designed to search for evidence
of inflation by measuring the large-angular scale CMB polarization signal.
BICEP2 recently reported a detection of B-mode power corresponding to the
tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.2 on ~2 degree scales. If the BICEP2 signal is
caused by inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), then there should be a
corresponding increase in B-mode power on angular scales larger than 18
degrees. PIPER is currently the only suborbital instrument capable of fully
testing and extending the BICEP2 results by measuring the B-mode power spectrum
on angular scales θ = ~0.6 deg to 90 deg, covering both the reionization
bump and recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar
ratio down to r = 0.007, and four frequency bands to distinguish foregrounds.
PIPER will accomplish this by mapping 85% of the sky in four frequency bands
(200, 270, 350, 600 GHz) over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from
the northern and southern hemispheres. The instrument has background-limited
sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.5 K) optics focusing the sky signal
onto four 32x40-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor
(TES) bolometers held at 140 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematic
control are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators
(VPMs), which rapidly modulate only the polarized sky signal at 3 Hz and allow
PIPER to instantaneously measure the full Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) for each
pointing. We describe the PIPER instrument and progress towards its first
flight.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume
9153. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014,
conference 915