Forecasts for a mm sky survey of the Northern Hemisphere with a 13-m antenna

¹ Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS/IN2P3, 53 Avenue des Martyrs, Grenoble, France
² Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG, F-38000 Grenoble, France

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Published online: 20 February 2026

Abstract

Most of the cosmic microwave background instruments currently observing at mm wavelengths are located in the Southern Hemisphere, and those in the Northern one are focused on observations of the large scale anisotropies with small aperture telescopes. Therefore, there is a gap for an instrument with a large mirror (D ≥ 10 m) that would survey the Northern sky. We propose a new photometer to be placed on a 13-meter diameter antenna in the Northern Hemisphere, which would observe the sky with four different bands: 90, 150, 220 and 260 GHz (3, 2, 1.4 and 1.15 mm, respectively) with ≤ 1′ resolution and a fieldof- view of 1 deg. We present a new set of simulations to assess the capabilities of the instrument when performing blind systematic detections of galaxy clusters through their Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect signal. We consider a wide and a deep survey covering 6000 and 300 deg² (named WS and DS, respectively) and observing for 3 years each with 50% time efficiency. We present the expected number of detections in both scenarios, and compare them with previous similar surveys.