The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r) = 0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensorto-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources a .

Cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization provides a unique window into cosmological inflation; the amplitude of the B-mode polarization from last scattering is uniquely sensitive to the energetics of inflation. However, numerous systematic effects arising from optical imperfections can contaminate the observed B-mode power spectrum. In particular, systematic effects due to the coupling of the underlying temperature and polarization fields with elliptical or otherwise asymmetric beams yield spurious systematic signals. This paper presents a nonperturbative analytic calculation of some of these signals. We show that results previously derived in real space can be generalized, formally, by including infinitely many higher-order corrections to the leading order effects. These corrections can be summed and represented as analytic functions when a fully Fourier-space approach is adopted from the outset. The formalism and results presented in this paper were created to determine the susceptibility of CMB polarization probes of the primary gravitational wave signal but can be easily extended to the analysis of gravitational lensing of the CMB.

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Gravitational lensing due to the large-scale distribution of matter in the cosmos distorts the primordial Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and thereby induces new, small-scale B -mode polarization. This signal carries detailed information about the distribution of all the gravitating matter between the observer and CMB last scattering surface. We report the first direct evidence for polarization lensing based on purely CMB information, from using the four-point correlations of even-and odd-parity E -and B -mode polarization mapped over ∼ 30 square degrees of the sky measured by the Polarbear experiment. These data were analyzed using a blind analysis framework and checked for spurious systematic contamination using null tests and simulations. Evidence for the signal of polarization lensing and lensing B -modes is found at 4.2σ (stat.+sys.) significance. The amplitude of matter fluctuations is measured with a precision of 27%, and is found to be consistent with the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) cosmological model. This measurement demonstrates 2 a new technique, capable of mapping all gravitating matter in the Universe, sensitive to the sum of neutrino masses, and essential for cleaning the lensing B -mode signal in searches for primordial gravitational waves.Introduction: As Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons traverse the Universe, their paths are gravitationally deflected by large-scale structures. By measuring the resulting changes in the statistical properties of the CMB anisotropies, maps of this gravitational lensing deflection, which traces large-scale structure, can be reconstructed. Gravitational lensing of the CMB has been detected in the CMB temperature anisotropy in several ways: in the smoothing of the acoustic peaks of the temperature power spectrum [1-3], in cross-correlations with tracers of the large-scale matter distribution [4][5][6][7][8][9][10], and in the four-point correlation function of CMB temperature maps [11][12][13][14].The South Pole Telescope (SPT) collaboration recently reported a detection of lensed polarization using the cross-correlation between maps of CMB polarization and sub-mm maps of galaxies from Herschel/SPIRE [15]. A companion paper to this one has also shown the evidence of the CMB lensing-Cosmic Infrared Background crosscorrelation results using Polarbear data [16], finding good agreement with the SPT measurements. This crosscorrelation is immune to several instrumental systematic effects but the cosmological interpretation of this measurement requires assumptions about the relation of submm galaxies to the underlying mass distribution [17].In this Letter, we present the first direct evidence for gravitational lensing of the polarized CMB using data from the Polarbear experiment. We present power spectra of the lensing deflection field for two four-point estimators using only CMB polarization data, and tests for spurious systematic contamination of these estimators. We combine the two estimators to increase the signal-to-noise of the lensing detection.CMB lens...