Prime-Cam: a first-light instrument for the CCAT-prime telescope

Abstract

CCAT-prime will be a 6-meter aperture telescope operating from sub-mm to mm wavelengths, located at 5600 meters elevation on Cerro Chajnantor in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Its novel crossed-Dragone optical design will deliver a high throughput, wide field of view capable of illuminating much larger arrays of sub-mm and mm detectors than can existing telescopes. We present an overview of the motivation and design of Prime-Cam, a first-light instrument for CCAT-prime. Prime-Cam will house seven instrument modules in a 1.8 meter diameter cryostat, cooled by a dilution refrigerator. The optical elements will consist of silicon lenses, and the instrument modules can be individually optimized for particular science goals. The current design enables both broadband, dual-polarization measurements and narrow-band, Fabry-Perot spectroscopic imaging using multichroic transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers operating between 190 and 450 GHz. It also includes broadband kinetic induction detectors (KIDs) operating at 860 GHz. This wide range of frequencies will allow excellent characterization and removal of galactic foregrounds, which will enable precision measurements of the sub-mm and mm sky. Prime-Cam will be used to constrain cosmology via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects, map the intensity of [CII] 158 µm emission from the Epoch of Reionization, measure Cosmic Microwave Background polarization and foregrounds, and characterize the star formation history over a wide range of redshifts. More information about CCAT-prime can be found at www.ccatobservatory.org.

Introducing constrained matched filters for improved separation of point sources from galaxy clusters

“…CCAT-prime will be a 6 m diameter submillimetre survey telescope that is going to operate at 5600 m altitude on the summit of the Cerro Chajnantor in the Chilean Atacama Desert (Parshley et al 2018a,b). The high and dry site offers superb conditions for observations at frequencies ranging from 270 GHz to 860 GHz (Vavagiakis et al 2018) at up to one order of magnitude better sensitivity than Planck (Erler et al 2018;Mittal, de Bernardis & Niemack 2018). Combined with mm-data of the advanced ACT-pol survey, CCAT-prime will offer full coverage of the SZ spectrum and allow significant improvements over Planck in measuring cluster parameters (Erler et al 2018;Stacey et al 2018).…”

The Design of the CCAT-prime Epoch of Reionization Spectrometer Instrument

“…With its exceptionally dry site, CCAT-prime is designed to take advantage of the extremely low water vapor in the millimeter and sub-millimeter bands [8]. EoR-Spec will occupy one instrument module in the Prime-Cam receiver, which will provide continuous cooling power with a dilution refrigerator, keeping the detector arrays at 100 mK [11]. For the EoR-Spec module, CCAT-prime will provide a wide 1.3 degree field of view and diffraction limited beam of 30-60 arcseconds (420-210 GHz, respectively), which is well matched to the Mpc clustering scale of the EoR signal.…”

Constraining the evolution of [C ii] intensity through the end stages of reionization

“…(vi) The Cerro Chajnantor Atacama Telescope (CCAT)prime experiment (Parshley et al 2018) with the Prime-Cam instrument (Vavagiakis et al 2018) and P-Spec imaging spectrometer, plans to probe the late stages of reionization using [CII] line emission over z ∼ 5 − 8. The parameters adopted for a CCAT-p-like configuration are based on the discussions in the document, https://www.ccatobservatory.org/docs/pdfs/Draft CCATp.prospectus.170809.pdf.…”