Optimised polarimeter configurations for measuring the Stokes parameters of the cosmic microwave background radiation

¹ Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire, IN2P3 CNRS, Université Paris Sud, 91405 Orsay, France
² Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, CNRS & Université Paris XI, Bât. 121, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France, and University of Chicago, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A.
³ Physique Corpusculaire et Cosmologie, Collège de France, 11 place Marcelin Berthelot, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France

Send offprint request to: J. Kaplan

Received: 10 July 1998
Accepted: 27 October 1998

Abstract

We present configurations of polarimeters which measure the three Stokes parameters I, Q and U of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation with a nearly diagonal error matrix, independent of the global orientation of the polarimeters in the focal plane. These configurations also provide the smallest possible error box volume.