COMPASS: AN UPPER LIMIT ON COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND POLARIZATION AT AN ANGULAR SCALE OF 20′

摘要

COMPASS is an on-axis 2.6 m telescope coupled to a correlation polarimeter operating at a wavelength of 1 cm. The entire instrument was built specifically for cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization studies. We report here on observations of 2001 February-April using this system. We set an upper limit on E-mode polarized anisotropies of 1036 μK~2 (95% confidence limit) in the l range 93-555.