LiteBIRD

LiteBIRD is a Japan-funded satellite mission to be launched by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) in the late 2020s. LiteBIRD will observe the CMB polarization from Earth’s orbit with more than 2,000 ultra-sensitive TES bolometer detectors at ~15 frequencies spanning 40-400 GHz.

LiteBIRD is designed to be the ultimate primordial gravitational wave observatory and will set fundamental limits on the the physics of inflation and reionization, providing definitive answers about some of cosmology’s greatest mysteries. The project is led by Japanese Principal Investigator Masashi Hazumi and includes contributions from both the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

US participation in LiteBIRD focuses on detector fabrication and testing at the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. The US team is led by Principal Investigator Adrian Lee at UC Berkeley and is in the evolving stages of the proposal process as of 2020.

My involvement in LiteBIRD focused mostly on forecasting experimental sensitivity, propagating low-level instrumental performance parameters all the way to constraints on cosmological parameters. These efforts were integral to specifying the requirements for the detector array, the optics, and the cooling performance.

For more information about LiteBIRD, visit its website!