Hans P. Paar

Ph.D. Columbia, 1974

hpaar@ucsd.edu     (858) 246-0405 (CASS office) or 858 534-5248 (Lab)

I am a member of the Polarbear Collaboration. Polarbear is the name of a campaign to measure the temperature and polarization properties of the CMB. With a UCSD colleague (Prof. Brian Keating) and colleagues from UC Berkely, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the University of Colorado and colleagues from Canade and Europe I am preparing a telescope to execute this program. Funding for the telescope was provided by a charitable foundation (to Brian Keating) and by an anonymous donor (to me). A total of $1M was donated, sufficient to finance the purchase of the telescope and its controls. The National Science Foundation has agreed to fund its receiver and its operations for a five year period.

The telescope is assembled at the CARMA site in the White Mountains in California in the Summer of 2009. Commissioning the detector at the CARMA site is expected to take about six months after which the telescope will be moved to the Atacama site in northern Chile. For more information, please consult the Polarbear website.


I have taught the third quarter of Quantum Physics 130C and an introduction to Quantum Field Theory to seniors at UCSD. Because I did not find a suitable textbook, I made my notes available in tex format. These notes will be published in book form in early 2010 by Wiley and Sons.