LiteBIRD: JAXA's new strategic L-class mission for all-sky surveys of cosmic microwave background polarization

Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2020, Online.-- et al.
LiteBIRD, the Lite (Light) satellite for the study of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection, is a space mission for primordial cosmology and fundamental physics. JAXA selected LiteBIRD in May 2019 as a strategic large-class (L-class) mission, with its expected launch in the late 2020s using JAXA’s H3 rocket. LiteBIRD plans to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization over the full sky with unprecedented precision. Its main scientific objective is to carry out a definitive search for the signal from cosmic inflation, either making a discovery or ruling out well-motivated inflationary models. The measurements of LiteBIRD will also provide us with an insight into the quantum nature of gravity and other new physics beyond the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. To this end, LiteBIRD will perform full-sky surveys for three years at the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point L2 for 15 frequency bands between 34 and 448 GHz with three telescopes, to achieve a total sensitivity of 2.16 µK-arcmin with a typical angular resolution of 0.5◦ at 100 GHz. We provide an overview of the LiteBIRD project, including scientific objectives, mission requirements, top-level system requirements, operation concept, and expected scientific outcomes.
This work is supported in Japan by ISAS/JAXA for Pre-Phase A2 studies, by the acceleration program of JAXA research and development directorate, by the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) of MEXT, by the JSPS Core-to-Core Program of A. Advanced Research Networks, and by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP15H05891, JP17H01115, and JP17H01125. The Italian LiteBIRD phase A contribution is supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI Grants No. 2020-9-HH.0 and 2016-24-H.1-2018), the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). The French LiteBIRD phase A contribution is supported by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiale (CNES), by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and by the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA). The Canadian contribution is supported by the Canadian Space Agency. The US contribution is supported by NASA grant no. 80NSSC18K0132. Norwegian participation in LiteBIRD is supported by the Research Council of Norway (Grant No. 263011). The Spanish LiteBIRD phase A contribution is supported by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI), project refs. PID2019-110610RB-C21 and AYA2017-84185-P. Funds that support the Swedish contributions come from the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA/Rymdstyrelsen) and the Swedish Research Council (Reg. no. 2019-03959). The German participation in LiteBIRD is supported in part by the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy (Grant No. EXC-2094 - 390783311). This research used resources of the Central Computing System owned and operated by the Computing Research Center at KEK, as well as resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy.