 QUIET merges members of previous collaborations that have made successful polarization measurements of the CMB. These are: CAPMAP (Princeton, Chicago, Miami, JPL, MPI-Bonn), CBI (Caltech, Oxford), and QUaD (Stanford, Manchester). A group from Columbia, with lots of experience in CMB measurements, and a group from Oslo, with expertise in CMB data processing and analysis, complete the collaboration.
Members of the Japanese High Energy Physics Laboratory KEK have recently joined QUIET. This constitutes the first initiative into studies of the CMB in Japan. The group is currently building a setup for testing HEMT detectors and is bringing their extensive experience in data acquisition hardware and software to bear in QUIET.
Individuals at Berkeley, Goddard Space Flight Center, and Harvard-Smithsonian have also contributed.
QUIET intends to make very sensitive measurements of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation, using the technology of coherent correlation polarimeters. It takes advantage of a breakthrough developed at JPL for the packaging of the polarimeters ("radiometer on a chip") which allows their mass production so that thousands of detectors can be used. QUIET is a multi-year program to measure the CMB with large arrays of coherent detectors from the ground. The arrays will consist of receivers at two frequencies (40 and 90 GHz) and use multiple telescopes (3x2m + 1x7m) at 5,080m in Chile in the Atacama desert. The measurements will cover angular scales from a few arcminutes to a few degrees. QUIET is currently in its first NSF approved phase and will soon be fielding two receivers: a 100 element W-band array and a 19 element Q-band array.
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