UK Simons Observatory (SO:UK) Consortium - Small Apeture Telescope Platform (SATP)

A Request for Proposals (RFP) was conducted by University of California, San Diego, in May 2018 for a vendor to design and construct small aperture camera platforms for the Simons Observatory (SO) which is a US-led international project to construct a group of CMB telescopes in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It has been designed to address new science challenges, and is due to begin operations in 2023.

In order to address its primary science goals, the SO collaboration has designed a single experiment that is unique amongst its peers in the field of CMB studies .

The major UK contribution to SO is to specifically build, deploy, commission and operate an array of two small aperture telescopes (the SO:UK instrument) to exactly match the existing (US) SO instrument proprietary plans awarded under Purchasing Agreement SD-18-1025.

The UK instrument will form a major component of the SO, providing 50% of its sensitivity to primordial B-modes. The additional sensitivity that will be provided by the SO:UK instrument has the potential to bring a compelling class of inflation models within our reach, for the first time.

In building the instrument, we will incorporate a number of innovative features including the first use of a new detector technology (Kinetic Inductance Detectors, KIDs) in a CMB B-mode experiment.

In addition to KIDs, the instrument work also includes the development and demonstration of novel meta-material (MM) quasi-optical components and high-performance detector readout technology.