Compass: An upper limit on cosmic microwave background polarization at an angular scale of 20′

Abstract

COMPASS is an on-axis 2.6 meter telescope coupled to a correlation polarimeter operating at a wavelength of 1 cm. The entire instrument was built specifically for CMB polarization studies. We report here on observations of February 2001 - April 2001 using this system. We set an upper limit on E-mode polarized anisotropies of 33.5 uK (95% confidence limit) in the l-range 200-600.Comment: Submitted to ApJ 8/19/200