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arXiv · 2608.20236

SPT-3G+: A Cosmic Microwave Background Experiment for the South Pole Telescope

Abstract

SPT-3G+ is the next survey receiver planned to be installed in early 2029 on the 10-meter South Pole Telescope (SPT). This new receiver will feature 6,020 polarization-sensitive dichroic pixels with transition-edge sensors observing in frequency bands centered at 90 GHz and 150 GHz. The 24,080 detectors in the SPT-3G+ receiver will be cooled to 100 mK by a dilution refrigerator and read out using microwave SQUID multiplexing. The optical design of the receiver enables a 4 degree diameter field of view, which is broken up into 14 individual optics tubes each containing cryogenic alumina, silicon, and nylon lenses. These technology choices will allow the SPT-3G+ receiver to improve on the mapping speed of the currently operating SPT-3G receiver by nearly an order of magnitude. Once deployed, the SPT-3G+ receiver will observe for 6-years an area overlapping with the BICEP survey to achieve a combined (90 GHz and 150 GHz) CMB map depth of 0.5 uK-arcmin. Data from these observations will be used to create unprecedentedly deep CMB lensing maps, discover new galaxy clusters, and detect astrophysical transients. The lensing map produced by SPT-3G+ will be used to remove or "delens" foreground B modes, where large-scale structure gravitationally lenses the CMB and converts E modes into B-mode polarization, with the goal of revealing inflationary B modes. Together with data from the BICEP Array as part of the South Pole Observatory, SPT-3G+ data will be used to constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ with a goal of achieving a measurement of $\sigma(r) = 0.001$

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T. Natoli, Z. Ahmed, H. Athreya, J. E. Austermann, K. Bae, A. Bapat, D. R. Barron, P. S. Barry, A. N. Bender, B. A. Benson, L. E. Bleem, J. E. Carlstrom, T. W. Cecil, C. L. Chang, S. Cisneros, A. Coerver, J. Cornelison, T. M. Crawford, R. Datta, K. R. Dibert, W. Dominguez, S. M. Duff, K. Fichman, J. P. Filippini, L. Gades, P. A. Gallardo, S. Galli, N. W. Halverson, Q. Hao, S. Henderson, R. Herbst, W. L. Holzapfel, A. Hryciuk, J. Hubmayr, D. Jones, V. Kabra, K. S. Karkare, C. King, M. A. Koc, A. M. Kofman, R. A. Lew, M. J. Link, T. J. Lucas, A. Mangu, E. S. Martsen, J. J. McMahon, J. Montgomery, J. M. Nagy, H. Nguyen, V. Novosad, S. Padin, T. Pinsonneault-Marotte, S. Raghunathan, A. S. Rahlin, C. L. Reichardt, L. Ruckman, J. E. Ruhl, M. S. Sarwar, S. Simon, R. Singh, J. A. Sobrin, A. A. Stark, Q. Taylor, C. Tucker, J. Ullom, J. Van Lanen, J. D. Vieira, A. G. Vieregg, M. R. Vissers, G. Wang, W. L. K. Wu, V. Yefremenko, E. Yilmaz, C. Yu, J. Zivick. 2026-08-20. SPT-3G+: A Cosmic Microwave Background Experiment for the South Pole Telescope. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20236

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