Development of 6-inch 80-170 GHz broadband silicon plated horn antenna arrays for primordial gravitational wave search

Yuanhang He; Shibo Shu; Yaqiong Li; Xuefeng Lu; Ye Chai; Xiang Li; Zhi Chang; He Gao; Yudong Gu; Xufang Li; Zhengwei Li; Zhouhui Liu; Guofeng Wang; Zhongxue Xin; Daikang Yan; Aimei Zhang; Yifei Zhang; Yongjie Zhang; Wenhua Shi; Juexian Cao; Congzhan Liu

arXiv · 2504.14585

Development of 6-inch 80-170 GHz broadband silicon plated horn antenna arrays for primordial gravitational wave search

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Abstract

Searching for primordial gravitational wave in cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization signal is one of the key topics in modern cosmology. Cutting-edge CMB telescopes requires thousands of pixels to maximize mapping speed. Using modular design, the telescope focal plane is simplified as several detector modules. Each module has hundreds of pixels including antenna arrays, detector arrays, and readout arrays. The antenna arrays, as the beam defining component, determine the overall optical response of the detector module. In this article, we present the developments of 6-inch broadband antenna arrays from 80GHz to 170GHz for the future IHEP focal plane module. The arrays are fabricated from 42 6-inch silicon wafers including 456 antennas, 7% more pixels than usual design. The overall in-band cross polarization is smaller than -20 dB and the in-band beam asymmetry is smaller than 10%, fulfilling the requirements for primordial gravitational wave search.

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Yuanhang He, Shibo Shu, Yaqiong Li, Xuefeng Lu, Ye Chai, Xiang Li, Zhi Chang, He Gao, Yudong Gu, Xufang Li, Zhengwei Li, Zhouhui Liu, Guofeng Wang, Zhongxue Xin, Daikang Yan, Aimei Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Yongjie Zhang, Wenhua Shi, Juexian Cao, Congzhan Liu. 2025-04-20. Development of 6-inch 80-170 GHz broadband silicon plated horn antenna arrays for primordial gravitational wave search. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14585

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