The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: The Receiver and Instrumentation

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope was designed to measure small-scale anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background and detect galaxy clusters through the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. The instrument is located on Cerro Taco in the Atacama Desert, at an altitude of 5190 meters. A six-met.er off-axis Gregorian telescope feeds a new type of cryogenic receiver, the Millimeter Bolometer Array Camera. The receiver features three WOO-element arrays of transition-edge sensor bolometers for observations at 148 GHz, 218 GHz, and 277 GHz. Each detector array is fed by free space mm-wave optics. Each frequency band has a field of view of approximately 22' x 26'. The telescope was commissioned in 2007 and has completed its third year of operations. We discuss the major components of the telescope, camera, and related systems, and summarize the instrument performance.