Published September 2, 2022 | Version v1

QUIJOTE Thirty and Forty Gigahertz Instrument (TFGI): commissioning and first preliminary results

Description

The Thirty and Forty Gigahertz Instrument (TFGI) observes the sky at 31 and 40 GHz, with ~20 arcminutes resolution. After a first test run during 2018-2019, it was re-mounted on the QUIJOTE experiment (located at the Teide Observatory, Tenerife) on November 2021 and began its commissioning phase. Now, after several months of continuous observations (more than 1400 hours until today), the data is being analyzed. In this poster, we present how the current sensitivity estimates from the measurements are consistent with those expected from the design phase: 50-60 μK√s (for polarization). Knee frequencies also behave accordingly to what was anticipated, with values below 100 mHz (also for polarization). Preliminary results on intensity are also shown, for two of the most interesting regions being observed: the Galactic Plane surrounding the supernova remnant W44 (l~34.5º), and the Cygnus region (l~80º). Maps from lower and higher frequencies surveys are also shown, as a comparison: the agreement with TFGI data is excellent. However, there is still room for improvements: no destriper is being applied to the data (which will eliminate the clear, stripe-shaped features present in the maps due to atmospheric 1/f contamination), and the calibration is not final. Furthermore, precise calibration of the polarization angle will be mandatory to produce polarization maps, where the 1/f signal is expected to be highly surpressed.

Notes

We thank the staff of the Teide Observatory for invaluable assistance in the commissioning and operation of QUIJOTE. The QUIJOTE experiment is being developed by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), the Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria (IFCA), and the Universities of Cantabria, Manchester and Cambridge. Partial financial support was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the projects AYA2007-68058-C03-01, AYA2007-68058-C03-02, AYA2010-21766-C03-01, AYA2010-21766-C03-02, AYA2014-60438-P, ESP2015-70646-C2-1-R, AYA2017-84185-P, ESP2017-83921-C2-1-R, PID2019-110610RB-C21, PID2020-120514GB-I00, IACA13-3E-2336, IACA15-BE-3707, EQC2018-004918-P, the Severo Ochoa Programs SEV-2015-0548 and CEX2019-000920-S, the Maria de Maeztu Program MDM-2017-0765 and by the Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2010-00064 (EPI: Exploring the Physics of Inflation). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement number 687312 (RADIOFOREGROUNDS). This poster made use of the IAC Supercomputing facility HTCondor (http://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/), partly financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness with FEDER funds, code IACA13-3E-2493. MFT is supported by a FPI MINECO scholarship. We acknowledge the use of data provided by the Centre d'Analyse de Données Etendues (CADE), a service of IRAP-UPS/CNRS (http://cade.irap.omp.eu). This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. Some of the results in this poster have been derived using the healpy and HEALPix package. We have also used numpy, matplotlib and astropy python packages.

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