Radiometer, Microwave, Dicke

This radiometer was designed to detect and measure the cosmic background microwave radiation in the sky. It was built by Peter G. Roll and David T. Wilkinson at Princeton University in the early 1960's to look for the the remnant radiation predicted by the "Hot Big Bang" theory of the origin of the Universe. It is based upon a design by Robert H. Dicke in 1946. The signal is acquired by the triangular horn antenna. The heart of the instrument is a device called a Dicke switch that alternately sends to the detector the signal from the antenna and that of a very cold reference source. The microwave background is the difference between the signals. This principle was used in the design of many other radiometers used for microwave background experiments including that in the COBE satellite. The Princeton Dicke radiometer search was preempted by the discovery of the CMB by Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs in 1965. There were much earlier indirect indications of this radiation from the specftroscopic analysis of the behaviour of Cyanogen in stellar atmospheres.

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