Prototype design and evaluation of the nine-layer achromatic half-wave plate for the LiteBIRD low frequency telescope

LiteBIRD is a satellite project to measure the polarization of the CMB with an unprecedented accuracy. LiteBIRD observes all sky for three years at the sun-earth second Lagrange point. The goal of LiteBIRD is to observe the B-mode polarization at large angular scales and to measure the tensor-to-scaler ratio r with an accuracy less than 0.001, exploring the energy scale of the inflation. In order to mitigate the system 1/f noise and systematics, we plan to use continuous rotating half-wave plates (HWPs) as a polarization modulator at each aperture of two telescopes. One of the telescopes, called a low frequency telescope (LFT), covers the frequency range from 34 to 270 GHz, requiring the HWP to have a high modulation efficiency in the wide bandwidth. We employ a Pancharatnam-type achromatic HWP (AHWP) to achieve the broadband coverage. The AHWP consists of nine layer stacked HWPs with the optic axes mutually rotated by the angles optimized for the LFT bandwidth. In this paper, we report our development status of the nine layer AHWP and measurement results on the modulation efficiency and the phase as a function of frequency.