Kristen McKee with John Ruhl
Measuring Scattering, Absorption, and Reflection Properties for Filters in the South Pole Telescope
A current problem with many ground-based telescope experiments, such as the South Pole Telescope, is that the optical loading on the detectors is undesirably high. In the South Pole Telescope, millimeter-wavelength photons from the sky interact with several filters before being focused into the final image. It is suspected that the high optical loading is due to the reflection, absorption, or scattering of light when it interacts with these filters. However, it is difficult to model these properties because they have a lot of uncertainty. In this project, I will be building and debugging a novel test setup to enable these measurements. I will then test several different filters that are being used in the South Pole Telescope in order to measure the amount of reflection, absorption, and scattering that is caused by each of the filters.