CONCERTO, which will be installed at APEX in Spring 2021, is the latest project I contribute to. It is a spectro-imager, based on a Martin-Puplett interferometer and KID cameras. Our main goal is to map the fluctuations of the [CII] line emission in 3D, at redshifts 5.1 < z < 8.5. The atomic [CII] line is indeed one of the most valuable tracers of star formation at high redshift and is redshifted into the sub-millimeter and millimeter atmospheric windows. We will use this line emission as a tracer of cosmic density structure, and place the first constraints on the power spectrum of dusty star-forming matter. Read more about CONCERTO on the project home page, and in this paper.

Over the past ten years, I have mostly worked on NIKA2. It is the new instrument to measure the continuum emission at the IRAM 30m telescope on Pico Veleta (Spain). It is based on Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KID) that have been designed and built by our group in Grenoble. Our group has actually been in charge of the full development of NIKA2, from its design to its commissioning. It observes the sky with about 700 KIDs at 2mm and about 2300 of them at 1.25mm, with the added possibility to measure linear polarization at 1.25mm. NIKA2 is open to the astronomy community. Our collaboration is in charge of 5 Large programs. Read more about NIKA2 on the project home page.

For about 10 years, as a postdoc and then a staff researcher at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS, Orsay), I worked on the calibration, analysis and preparation of CMB polarization dedicated instruments. I worked on Planck-HFI, in particular its calibration. I also contributed to the US projects BICEP (P. I.: Caltech), a ground based telescope located at the South Pole, and EBEX (P. I.: University of Minnesota), a long duration balloon borne telescope to be launched from the McMurdo station in Antarctica. During this period, I also contributed to studies of future satellites that would be dedicated to CMB polarization: EPIC (USA-JPL) and BPol/COrE (ESA).

Before that, I did my PhD on the balloon borne project Archeops. It was a precursor of Planck-HFI, with, in particular, the same cryogenic He3/He4 dilution and the same bolometers. We launched it from the Esrange base near Kiruna (Sweden), north of the polar circle in 2001 and 2002. Our primary goal was to measure the CMB temperature anisotropy on a large fraction of the sky and up to the second acoustic peak. We also provided the first measurements of dust polarized thermal emission on large angular scales, as a foreground to the CMB. Archeops therefore was an intermediate generation instrument, in the same class as BOOMERANG and MAXIMA as far as CMB temperature anisotropy is concerned, but also a precursor of the current fully polarization sensitive instruments.