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The LiteBIRD experiment is an international spaceborne mission, led by JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, to observe cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The satellite will be deployed to measure and characterize the signature of the primordial gravitational waves from cosmic inflation in the B-mode polarization of the CMB radiation. LiteBIRD will also explore the nature of quantum gravity as well as attempt to detect the recombination peak and reionization peak with greater than 5σ significance for a tensor-to-scalar value of r = 0.01. These observations and measurements will take place over 15 separate frequency bands in the range of 34–448 GHz. The 15 frequency channels are separated into three telescopes—low, medium, and high frequency. This paper will describe the process flow developed to fabricate the low frequency detectors, covering bands from 34 to 161 GHz. The detector wafer itself has a device side and a sky side. The device side contains the trichroic polarization sensitive sinuous antennae coupled to transition-edge sensor detectors. The skyside contains the cosmic ray mitigation structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a cosmic microwave background instrumentation suite in the Atacama Desert of Chile. More than 65,000 polarization-sensitive transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers will be fielded in the frequency range spanning 27 to 280 GHz, with three separate dichroic designs. The mid-frequency 90/150 GHz and ultra-high-frequency 220/280 GHz detector arrays, fabricated at NIST, account for 39 of 49 total detector modules and implement the feedhorn-fed orthomode transducer-coupled TES bolometer architecture. A robust production-level fabrication framework for these detector arrays and the monolithic DC/RF routing wafers has been developed, which includes single device prototyping, process monitoring techniques, in-process metrology, and cryogenic measurements of critical film properties. Application of this framework has resulted in timely delivery of nearly 100 total superconducting focal plane components to SO with 88 % of detector wafers meeting nominal criteria for integration into a detector module: a channel yield > 95 % and T c in the targeted range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]