The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the RIKEN Centre for Advanced Photonics signed, on Monday, at the IAC Headquarters in La Laguna, Tenerife, an agreement for scientific collaboration in the installation, at the Teide Observatory, (Izaña, Tenerife) of the GroundBIRD experiment, a new radiotelescope for cosmological studies. This experiment is designed to measure from the ground the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) in order to look for observational evidence, by detecting the B-modes, of cosmic Inflationan epoch of accelerated expansion in the early universe. GroundBIRD just as the existing QUIJOTEexperiment, will look for traces of the Big Bang, but will do so at a different frequency in the millimetre wavelength range, at 150 and 220 GHz, improving substantially, by almost an order of magnitude, the best limits to this signal which have been determined up to now.

GroundBIRD is a collaboration formed by the following institutions: RIKEN Centre for Advanced Photonics, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), Saitama University, Tohoku University (Japan), Korea University and the IAC. The Teide Observatory has been selected as the future location of this experiment, whose first light is expected towards the end of 2017 and its operation will extend for three years, thanks to its excellent characteristics for astrophysical observation.